e-flux is pleased to present a collaborative screening and live performance by Jeff Preiss and Anthony McCall. The evening opens with the premiere of Beckoning Cats (2025), a new film by Preiss created specifically for this occasion, and continues with a reimagined performance that revisits a collaborative work originally presented during the final exhibition at the experimental gallery Orchard in 2008.
The program features the eighth iteration of Anthony McCall’s Five Minute Drawing, first performed in 1974. McCall’s precisely choreographed live drawing unfolds alongside Preiss’s real-time documentary projection—an orchestration of filmed gestures and reworked imagery drawn from their earlier collaboration at Orchard. Together, the artists construct a layered temporal structure in which past and present are superimposed, expanding the documentary mode into a poetics of re-staging. The performance also draws upon the screen and sequence configurations from Preiss’s 2002 collaboration with Joan Jonas, Montage Vérité, originally curated by Karin Schneider for TRANS>area.
The program also marks the premiere of Preiss’s Beckoning Cats, a ten-minute 16mm-to-digital work made in homage to Chris Marker. The film reflects on an anonymous shrine discovered outside Light Industry in Brooklyn on August 26, 2016—twenty-eight days after Marker’s death—featuring twenty Maneki-Neko figurines, a recurring motif in Marker’s oeuvre. Preiss uses these folklore icons as a visual foundation, moving from their mechanical gestures of welcome into a meditation on aviation, cinema, and apocalyptic time ruptures.