Screening and discussion with filmmaker and artist Mary Helena Clark.
Join us at e-flux Screening Room on Thursday, March 26, 2026 at 7pm for a screening and discussion with filmmaker and artist Mary Helena Clark. The program presents a selection of Clark’s works and additional works to be announced.
Working across film, video, and installation, Clark makes montage-driven works that expand the connotative possibilities of sound and image, producing a fragmentary viewing experience that resists conventional narrative assurance. Her films often operate through collage, citation, and carefully staged juxtapositions, where voices, objects, and environments feel both evidentiary and unreliable, and where meaning emerges through atmosphere, intuitive connections, and sonic precision rather than explanatory framing.
Program
Mary Helena Clark, Neighboring Animals (2024, 9 minutes)
Neighboring Animals is organized around the mouth–as a tool to bite and chew, as an instrument of speech, and as a site of disgust and desire. The film incorporates footage of animal dentistry, bite mark analysis, and a reliquary containing the tooth of Mary Magdalene, alongside text quoting from psychological studies on disgust, Georges Bataille, and Emily Dickinson, among others.
Mary Helena Clark, Clever Hans (2025, 5 minutes)
A single-channel adaptation of a two-channel work, Clever Hans revisits the famous story of the “calculating” horse to probe the intersubjective space between an animal and the researcher-cum-trainer. The work lingers on the problem of cueing, attention, and desire, asking what it means to mistake responsiveness for proof.
Mary Helena Clark, Figure Minus Fact (2020, 13 minutes)
Night, like mourning, remakes space through absence: forms at the threshold of perception heighten sound and touch. When someone dies there is a pull towards the concrete and tangible, but disbelief creates a world of unreliable objects. Figure Minus Fact draws and redraws coordinates between spaces, senses, and objects, groping in the dark, desiring to see something that’s not there. Spaces become evidentiary yet deceptive in a subject-less portrait of loss.
Mary Helena Clark, The Glass Note (2018, 9 minutes)
The Glass Note re-contextualizes seemingly unconnected elements—fragmented bodies, statuary, a beach marred by a storm, a virtual ocean, the phenomena of lithophonic stones, empty bear cages at an abandoned zoo, a chair that served as a hearing aid—to understand the body’s permeability and to extend the sensorial beyond the corporeal. Playing with notions of ‘thrown voice’ and the untrustworthy image, sound and image commingle, animate, and touch each other, exploring cinema’s inherent ventriloquism.
Mary Helena Clark, Exhibition (2022, 19 minutes)
Exhibition moves through gallery rooms and archives, compounding multiple biographies into a single imaginary subject. A woman marries the Berlin Wall, stabs a Velázquez painting as an act of protest and longing, declares herself a doorknob, and plumbs the erotics of the Klein bottle. Using citation, appropriation, and museological forms of display, the film is a mediation on the assertion and refusal of subjecthood.
