21c Museum Hotel Durham is pleased to present a film screening of Breakdown, an event organized by Teka Selman as part of The Citizen, a mobile exhibition platform based primarily in Durham, North Carolina and its environs, presenting film, video, sound and installation works by contemporary artists engaged with the social and political concerns of our time.

Breakdown (2011), a video collaboration between artists Simone Leigh and Liz Magic Laser with opera singer Alicia Hall Moran, explores the history of psychological “breakdowns” on stage and screen. Bearing witness to Moran’s operatic, tense repetition of mundane phrases – her voice and movements jerking and teetering as if on a razor’s edge – the film provides a rare, sanctioned glimpse of a black female in emotional crisis over the familiar pressures of everyday life. The viewer’s resulting discomfort is also an opportunity for empathy, and a reframing of the social discourse around black women and hysteria in popular culture.

Image: Film still from Breakdown, 2011, single-channel video, 8 minutes. Simone Leigh and Liz Magic Laser in collaboration with Alicia Hall Moran.

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