In the 1980s, Adnan regularly traveled with a Super-8mm camera in hand. She visited New York frequently, staying at a friend’s apartment in a high-rise overlooking the East River. While there, she would repeatedly attempt to capture the sun touching skyscrapers’ windows, the geometry of bridges, the marriage of light and water, the movement of barges on the river, the shapes of factory smoke – the oddly meditative poetry of inexorable motion at the immediate edge of city life. The footage was retrieved and digitized three decades later, and edited into a feature-length film, MOTION, which premiered at Documenta 13 in 2012. — BIDOUN

Director: Etel Adnan