Fear of Breakdown

with Felix Bernstein and Cassandra Seltman

Wednesday, January 29, 6:30pm
Géza, 306 Maujer

Still from Loretta Fahrenholz, IMPLOSION, 2011. HD video, 30 min, color, sound. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/Cologne/New York.

Join us for a film screening and conversation on performance, fragmentation, and affective rupture in the work of Loretta Fahrenholz with writer and theorist Felix Bernstein and psychoanalyst Cassandra Seltman. The discussion will focus on Loretta’s latest film Trash The Musical (2023)—on view as part of her current exhibition at Amant—as well as her 2011 film IMPLOSION, which will be screened as part of this event.

Trash The Musical is a post-cinematic portrait that follows the performance artist Alicia McDaid as she cleans out her aging uncle’s Philadelphia home, a process that Loretta deftly juxtaposes with footage of the absurdist performances Alicia produces for social media. IMPLOSION—a reimagining of Kathy Acker’s 1983 play of the same title—weaves a surreal and fragmented narrative shot through with themes of desire, identity, and disintegration that eschews conventional characters, scenes, or a typical narrative progression.

Both films are exemplary of Loretta’s approach to filmmaking, juxtaposing the digital and the corporeal and disrupting conventional narrative structures and expectations of cinema.

With their respective backgrounds in literature, philosophy, and psychoanalysis as a lens, Bernstein and Seltman will link Loretta’s films with a new theory of breakdown based on the work of Donald Winnicott, Jacques Lacan, and Wilfred Bion. A knotted web tying together surplus, waste, celebrity meltdown, spectacle, hoarding, data management, desperate loneliness, and institutionalization, this presentation will point to new modes of containment that serve as an alternative to the classic compromise formation of the symptom.

Amant programs are always free. RSVPs are required. Fear of Breakdown will start at 6:30pm on Thursday, January 16 in Géza, located at 306 Maujer.

Felix Bernstein stages psychofictional scenes as lectures, essays, satire, and melodrama, using errant bodies of imagery and discourse to bore holes through crusty ideals. He is the author of Burn Book (Nightboat, 2016) and Notes on Post-Conceptual Poetry (Insert Blanc Press, 2015), and director, with Gabe Rubin, of Madame de Void (2018). He has performed at institutions including Artists Space, LA MOCA, LUMA Westbau, and the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Dr. Cassandra Seltman is an author and psychoanalyst in private practice in New York City. She teaches at NPAP and in the master’s program at Hunter College. Publications can be found in the LA Review of Books, Flash Art, Pioneer Works Broadcast, and the forthcoming issue of May Revue.

Related Exhibition

September 19, 2024 – February 16, 2025