About

Born in the Bronx, NY, I attended Union College in Schenectady, NY, and Columbia University School of Architecture in NY. My focus has been on producing independent film, video, and media artworks since the early 70s. Collaborating with THE WOOSTER GROUP, a New York-based experimental theater, I have also created a number of performance/media pieces for theatrical presentation.

My work has been showcased in various film and video festivals, including Ann Arbor, CinemaTexas, Bellevue, Sinking Creek, Athens (Ohio), Atlanta Film Festival, American Film Festival (Film-as-Art), San Francisco Film Festival (Golden Gate Awards), Black Maria Film/Video Festival, Montreal, Oberhausen (West Germany), Hyeres (France), Melbourne (Australia), Montbeliard (France), Rotterdam, Video Week (Geneva), World-Wide (Holland), Lucarno (Switzerland), VideoKunst (Karlsruhe), the New York Video and Film Festival, and at the Berlin Film Festival-International Forum. It  has also been featured in group shows in London, Paris, Sidney, Budapest, Warsaw, Amsterdam, Tokyo, and Bangkok and is part of museum collections, including MOMA New York, Centre Pompidou-Paris, and the Stjedlick-Amsterdam.

In addition, I have worked for many years as a cinematographer and editor on various documentary films on art and artists, including Joan Mitchell, Chuck Close, Lucas Samaras, James Bidgood, Yayoi Kusama, Louise Bourgeois, Emilia and Ilya Kabakov, Elizabeth Murray, and Ursula von Rydingsvrd.

I was never a filmmaker, officially, in that I never studied filmmaking. I was a photography hobbyist and then a ‘lay’ filmmaker. I found there was something called experimental film after I began making them myself. It was just a way of speaking, of writing, self contained and referential, like poetry, solitary and for no purpose other than the joy of the making of it. Because I loved images and I loved talking. I studied philosophy and art. And thought I would read for the rest of my life, but I discovered in film a way to think and make beautiful images, and that those two aspects together made something else, an art in itself. Film art.

Every artist is a re-synthesizer of the art and thinking of the past. In that sense there really is nothing new, only re-thought, re-explored, an unfinished, unending argument with materials, ideas and the visual world. In a way I see myself as an essayist, and using texts and words are an important part of my work. I liked reading and words and pictures have been an important way for me to play, to think out loud, to involve you.

In that sense there’s also been a draw toward the theatrical… which is to me essentially how film represents the world, as a piece of theater. And I mean that to include films without people, with only buildings and landscapes the stage set of the world. It interests me, how, if one pays attention to, how choreographed and stage-like reality is, when framed!  The seemingly incidental arrangement of things, sound and images; there is nothing that remains ‘just what it is,’ once it’s framed. So the frame reinvents the world as a stage and I perform my little plays, my arguments on it. For me the films all have the sense that they’re sets, with an event, a performance in a box. Maybe beginning my work using an original optical printer had something to do with it. The sense that the film wasn’t a glass window-pane on the world out there, but was really a world itself, a diorama in a black box.... boxes,  enclosures, houses, buildings, framings often abstracted, often without figures… But then no observed place is ever really ‘empty;’ there is no space without stories.)

—Ken Kobland