Cine-East Series: The Memory Project--"Self-Portrait and Dialogue with My Mother"/"Self-Portrait With Three Women" w/ Zhang Mengqi

Duke University presents a screening.

Live Performance & Film Screening w/ Zhang Mengqi: "Self-Portrait and Dialogue with My Mother" (performance) and "Self-Portrait With Three Women" (Zhang Mengqi, 2010, 70 min, China, Chinese with English subtitles, Color, DVD). // "Self-Portrait and Dialogue with My Mother" is a thirty-minute performance piece involving dance and live projection. "I am trying to use this dialogue to stage an intervention, my mother hopes it will allow her to connect with me more intimately. She uses words to recall episodes of my birth, our mother-daughter goodbyes and reunions, and my growing up. She says that I am the continuation of her existence." - Zhang Mengqi // -- Zhang Mengqi's "Self-Portrait with Three Women" represents "a wholehearted attempt to reconcile personal history, from the corporeal to the abstract. With regard to her mother and maternal grandmother as both generational and emotional touchpoints, Zhang constructs a intimate narrative that blends the boundaries of physical spaces and bodies and dwelling places with the intangible sense of memory, of passed time. Zhang's approach to her indisciplinary autobiography is remarkably frank, incorporating voice-over biographical details and archival photographs and letters to set the record spinning into motion." - Maya E. Rudolph, dGenerate Films // -- Part of the Cine-East/Memory Project Series: Four Chinese film directors present their work exploring elder villagers' memories of the "3-Year Famine" (1959-1961)