Thirteen Black Cats

Thirteen Black Cats presented 1/56, the first iteration of a multi-authored moving image work in which filmmakers and artists from around the world are invited to participate in making a serial film and video work inspired by Chilean author Roberto Bolaño’s novel Antwerp (2002), consisting of fifty-six chapters. 1/56 is produced in partnership with the 31st Biennial of Graphic Arts in Ljubljana, curated by Nicola Lees.

Thirteen Black Cats is a research and production collective founded by Vic Brooks, Lucy Raven and Evan Calder Williams. Lucy Raven is an artist based in New York City. Her work has been included in exhibitions and screenings internationally including solo exhibitions at VOX, Montreal (2015); EMPAC, Troy, NY (2015); Portikus, Frankfurt, Germany, and Yerba Buena, San Francisco (2014). Other exhibitions include Hammer Projects, the Hammer Museum, LA (2013); Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2012); and 11 Rooms, Manchester International Festival, Manchester (2011). She currently teaches at the Cooper Union School of Art and the School of Visual Arts in New York. Evan Calder Williams is a writer, theorist, and artist. He is the author of Combined, Uneven Apocalypse and Roman Letters, as well as two books forthcoming in 2015, Shard Cinema and Donkey Time. His writing has appeared in Film Quarterly, The New Inquiry, Historical Materialism, La Furia Umana, The Italianist, World Picture, and The Third Rail, and he is a contributing editor to Viewpoint Magazine. He has presented films, performance, and audio works at the Serpentine Gallery, London (2014); Images Festival, Toronto (2014); the Montreal International Festival du Nouveau Cinéma (2014); Artists Space, New York (2013); Tramway, Glasgow (2012) and the Whitney Museum, New York (2012). He is a 2015 artist-in-residence at ISSUE Project Room and teaches at Bard College’s Center for Curatorial Studies. Vic Brooks is a curator and producer based in Troy, NY. As curator of time- based visual art at EMPAC (Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center) at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, recent and forthcoming artists’ commissions include Andros Zins-Browne & Karthik Pandian; Charles Atlas; Silas Riener + Rashaun Mitchell; Isabelle Pauwels; Lucy Raven; Rosa Barba and Tarek Atoui among others. She was curator-in-residence at LUX during autumn 2014 and in 2013 initiated The Jaffe Colloquia, an ongoing series of seminars centered around the conditions of, and perspectives on, time-based arts. Prior to EMPAC, Brooks founded the itinerant curatorial platform The Island with Andrew Bonacina and co-curated Serpentine Gallery’s artist-cinema program with Nicola Lees.