Join us for a screening of Those That, at a Distance, Resemble Another, followed by a panel discussion with the film’s director Jessica Sarah Rinland, anthropologist Grace Kim-Butler, and conservator Soon Kai Poh.

Synopsis
With an elephant’s ivory tusk as the protagonist, Those That, at a Distance, Resemble Another meditates upon the endless tactility of museological and ecological conservation, inviting reflection upon forms of representation, replicas, and embodiments of various materials, disciplines, and institutions.

Watch the trailer.

Argentine-British artist filmmaker, Jessica Sarah Rinland’s work has been screened and exhibited internationally at Taipei Biennial (2020), University of Tennessee Downtown Gallery (2021), National Gallery Singapore (2021), Tabakalera (2019), Somerset House (2016), and Bloomberg New Contemporaries (2011). She has won awards including Special Mention at the Locarno Film Festival and Best Film at DocumentaMadrid (Those That, at a Distance, Resemble Another, 2019), Primer Premio at Bienale de Imagen en Movimiento (Black Pond, 2018), Arts + Science Award at Ann Arbor Film Festival (2014), ICA’s Best Experimental Film at LSFF (2013), and MIT’s Schnitzer Prize for excellence in the arts (2017). Residencies include the Film Studies Center at Harvard University, Somerset House Studios, Flaherty Seminar Fellowship, MacDowell, and Ikusmira Berriak. She holds an MSc in Arts, Culture and Technology from MIT.

Grace Kim-Butler is an anthropologist of art and science, with a focus on how authenticity, expertise, and materiality come to matter through laboratory practice. Her current book project examines how scientists develop technologies for the restoration of art and cultural heritage. In 2019–20, she was a postdoctoral fellow in the Scholars Program at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles. She received her PhD in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology, and Society (HASTS) at MIT in 2019. She is currently an ACLS Emerging Voices Postdoctoral Fellow at Vanderbilt University, where she is helping to revise the curriculum of the Communication of Science and Technology program.


Soon Kai Poh is the Conservation as a Human Science Fellow at Bard Graduate Center. He is a recent graduate of the dual MA/MS program in the History of Art and the Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works at the Conservation Center, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, specializing in objects conservation with a particular interest in Asian and Near Eastern works of art. He has completed internships and worked on projects in the conservation labs of the Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, the Peabody Essex Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Elmer Holmes Bobst Library, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. As part of his graduate training, he worked on site at New York University’s excavations at Aphrodisias in Turkey and participated in multiple conservation projects at Villa La Pietra, New York University’s academic center in Florence, Italy.
This event will be held via Zoom. A link will be circulated to registrants by 3 pm on the day of the event.