This #FilmFridays feature is Dawoud Bey’s video 9.15.63 which he made in 2013. Click the link below to watch on Vimeo for 24 hours from Friday, May 15 until Saturday, May 16.
Join us on social media and tag @SeanKellyNY to share a pic of your at-home screening. The person who submits the winning picture of them watching the film will receive a signed copy of #DawoudBey’s publication.
#DawoudBey’s film 9.15.63 is a part of one of his most important series, "The Birmingham Project," a deeply felt and conceptually rich tribute to the victims of the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama, on September 15, 1963. For this body of work, Bey created a series of photographs in which he paired two life-size portraits representing the victims of the bombing and related violence on that day in Birmingham: one is a portrait of a young person who was the same age as one of the victims; the other is an image of an adult approximately 50 years older, the age that child would have been in 2013 had he or she survived.The film is a split-screen projection that juxtaposes the re-creation of a drive to the 16th Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama opposite views of everyday spaces. On the right, we see the drive from the window of a moving vehicle, with the camera looking up at trees and the roofs of houses from the vantage point of a young child. On the left, slow pans move through various locations —some familiar (a beauty parlor and barbershop), some politically charged (a lunch counter and schoolroom), as they might have appeared that Sunday morning. Devoid of people, these views poeticize the innocent, mundane existences torn apart by violence on that fateful morning.