The Last Forever – A live cine-performance artwork by Kamila Kuc and Scott Stark
Kamila Kuc and Scott Stark will be in town to perform their live collaborative video piece involving digital slides, live music, voice, and hula hoops!
Family photographs are no longer confined to photo albums and stored in a shoebox under one’s bed. Instead, personal archives have become sites of public spectacle, easily distributed across geographies and shared through social media, resulting in the personal being accessible to total strangers. Traveling together through endless cosmologies of discarded family memories we are the strangers – as creators and as audiences. Together we become part of a story that unfolds live, before our very eyes.
During the pandemic, artists Kamila Kuc and Scott Stark perused hundreds of discarded 35mm family slides from garage sales, lab castoffs, flea markets, eBay, gifts from friends, as well as their own archives. In a shared Google Doc, the artists played a series of ‘exquisite corpse’ tennis sets, a back and forth exchange of images and captions, allowing mysterious characters and spontaneous plot twists to evolve into a playful narrative. In many of these seemingly mundane images, the artists discovered subtle indicators of interpersonal family dynamics captured by the camera during dinners, parties and travels. Who is standing next to who; who is looking at who; and who is absent all provided clues to the artists’ frisky ruminations on the complexities of human and more-than-human relations as mediated by technology.. The artists have woven these latent intimations and subtle indicators into a sprawling narrative – about a spouse that’s gone missing – a story that is fanciful, poignant, occasionally illogical but always entertaining.
Kamila Kuc is a Polish-born artist based between London and Seattle. She works across film, performance, movement, and hybrid nonfiction. Her work approaches memory, ancestry, and womanhood as sites of inheritance, resistance, and transformation. Informed by therapeutic training, she understands the body as both archive and threshold – a place where experience is held, negotiated, and reimagined. Through intimate, hybrid forms, she creates encounters with vulnerability not as exposure, but as a means of connection, reflection, and repair.
Scott Stark has produced more than 85 films and videos since 1980. Born and educated in the midwest, he has always been interested in aggressively pushing his work beyond the threshold of traditional viewing expectations, challenging the audience to question its relationship to the cinematic process; yet he also tries to build into the work elements of humor and incongruity that allow the viewer an entryway into the work while maintaining a critical distance. He has taught art classes at the San Francisco Art Institute (where he also received his MFA), interweaving non-traditional uses of film and video with a variety of art disciplines. He currently lives in Austin, Texas. He is the author of the Flicker pages.
