Light Work’s Urban Video Project is pleased to present the exhibition Lines of Flight featuring short films by multimedia artist Joiri Minaya and filmmaker Miryam Charles exploring the tangled trajectories of displacement, immigration, invasion, exploration and escape.

The exhibition will run from February 27 – May 24, 2025 as an architectural projection venue on the Everson Museum facade.

Additional work by Joiri Minaya will be on view at the Syracuse University Museum in the show Joiri Minaya: Unseeing the Tropics at the Museum from January 21 to May 10, 2025. 

In conjunction with the exhibition, Minaya and Charles will be present for a screening and Q&A on Thursday, March 20 at 6:30pm in Watson Theater across from Light Work’s  galleries.

About the Work

Labadee
Joiri Minaya
2017 | HD video
Duration: 7:06

Labadee is a short video documenting parts of a Royal Caribbean cruise trip in Labadee, Haiti, and the dynamics that unfold in this privately-managed space, which is fenced off and leased to Royal Caribbean cruises until 2050. The subtitles in the video begin with text from the diary of Christopher Columbus when they first saw land, moving into a contemporary recount of the trip we’re seeing.

It meditates on the exploitation, self-exploitation, performance and access control created by the system of tourism in the Caribbean, and, in linking it to Columbus’ Invasion through the first sentences in the subtitles, it traces the lineage of these contemporary spaces to colonization.

Fly, Fly Sadness
Miryam Charles 
2015 | 16mm film transfered to video
Duration: 5:23

A nuclear explosion mysteriously transforms the voices of all the inhabitants of an island. A  journalist travels to the island to learn more and finds herself transformed.

About the Artists

Joiri Minaya is a Dominican-US multidisciplinary artist whose recent works focus on destabilizing historic and contemporary representations of an imagined tropical identity. Minaya attended the Escuela Nacional de Artes Visuales in Santo Domingo (2009), Altos de Chavón School of Design (2011) and Parsons the New School for Design (2013).She has participated in esteemed residency programs such as Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Smack Mellon, NYFA Mentoring Program for Immigrant Artists, Vermont Studio Center, and Fountainhead. She has received numerous awards, fellowships and grants including NYSCA/NYFA, Jerome Hill, Socrates Sculpture Park, the Joan Mitchell Foundation, amongst other organizations. 

Artist’s website: joiriminaya.com

Miryam Charles is a Haitian-Canadian director, producer and cinematographer living in Montreal. She has produced several short and feature films. Her films have been presented in various festivals internationally. Her first feature film, Cette Maison (This House) was presented at the Berlinale, the AFI film festival and was included in the TIFF Top 10 of the year. Several of her short films and her feature are available to stream on the Criterion Channel. Her work explores themes related to exile and the legacies of colonization.

Distributor’s website: ladistributrice.ca/…miryam-charles

Sponsors

This project was made possible through a Support for Artists grant by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.