BlackStar Projects, the premier organization celebrating visionary Black, Brown, and Indigenous film and media artists, in partnership with The Fabric Workshop and Museum, is proud to present a new iteration of Revival!, an audio-visual meditation celebrating the visual and sonic culture of shared Black spiritual experience. The installation is part of BlackStar’s efforts to provide engaging programming that extends beyond their annual film festival, hosted in Philadelphia each summer. Originally a live-streamed series of virtual dance parties and performances, this iteration of Revival! will be on view in The Fabric Workshop and Museum’s Arch Street window from February 21 through June 6, 2021, and will gradually expand and evolve over that time.
Revival! features an audio-visual mix by filmmaker and artist Rashid Zakat. An attempt to reimagine and practice what collective joy and resilience look like in times of crisis, Revival! subtly draws upon José Esteban Muñoz’s notion of ecstasy as “an invitation, a call to a then-and-there, a not-yet-here… a collective potentiality,” treating ecstasy not only as a corrective balm to injury but a world-making claim to the right of life, imagination, and joyful expression, an especially critical response to our current moment.
Featured on a grid of video monitors in FWM’s front window on Arch Street in Center City, the accompanying soundtrack for Revival! will be projected onto the street during museum hours. Viewers are also invited to scan a QR code to access the Revival! stream from their personal devices anytime, anywhere. The installation is meant to be iterative, with evolving content to be featured over the course of its run through early June.
Museum hours are 12 pm to 6 pm on Tuesday through Friday and 12 pm to 5 pm on Saturday and Sunday. Additional support for Revival! is provided by the Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF) Paideia Program at the University of Pennsylvania.
To see more of Zakat’s work, visit Rashid.tv.
About The Fabric Workshop and Museum
Founded in 1977, The Fabric Workshop and Museum (FWM) both makes and presents, encouraging artists to experiment with new materials and new media in a veritable living laboratory. Through its renowned Artist-in-Residence (AIR) Program, FWM collaborates with artists to expand their practices, while documenting the course of artistic production from inspiration to realization. FWM presents large-scale exhibitions, installations, and performative work, utilizing innovative fiber and other media. Today, FWM is the only US institution devoted to creating work in textile and new media in collaboration with some of the most significant artists of our time.
About BlackStar Film Festival
The BlackStar Film Festival is an annual celebration of the visual and storytelling traditions of the African diaspora and global communities of color — showcasing films by Black, Brown, and Indigenous people from around the world.
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