“These bodily fluids…are what life withstands, hardly and with difficulty, on the part of death. There, I am at the border of my condition as a living being. My body extricates itself, as being alive, from that border. Such wastes drop so that I might live, until, from loss to loss, nothing remains in me and my entire body falls beyond the limit — cadere, cadaver.” – Julia Kristeva

The Jettisoned references the tradition of the Tableau Vivant in painting and photography as it maps representations of identity and the bodily.

This video installation presents a multi-channel video series about sites for ritual healing and the notion of collective, conditional, and porous anatomies. Memories, histories, and physiologies become the rich and divergent territory for Yoni Goldstein and Meredith Zielke’s investigations into shared biography and shared biology. Unlike the delineated moral cartographies of traditional tableaux in painting and photography, the composition of The Jettisoned present anachronistic and subjectivized composite maps of identity, bodily mechanism, and abject recognition. The collective body challenges its host, as Julia Kristeva posits, with “a weight of meaninglessness, about which there is nothing insignificant.” (Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, 1982)

“The Jettisoned is a surveilling gaze. Bodies crowd the space, in mid-action, some performing a pieta-like pose while another takes a look at her scrapped knee beneath a magnifying glass. The scene opens with what appears to be individuals caught in acts of caring but as the camera pans over them, they and their actions are transformed into a sensual grotesquity. Water flows through the scene in distended tubes like disemboweled intestines. From the lips of one to the lips of another. From a stainless steel cup down a funnel into another mouth. The Jettisoned recreates a still-life of relation amongst the subject-made-object through an abject gaze. Through the gaze of the camera, the subject is depicted, made an image and in this state the abject nature of medical relationality is brought into visibility. The trauma produced by such a position is buffeted, however, by the sensual nature of the cinematography and in a way finds healing in the aestheticization of the traumatic. The film ends with a slow, ritual washing of the concrete floor of the space. Poured from a silver stainless steel bucket out onto the floor, the camera closes in as the water saturates and darkens the damp floor, elucidating the dark transformation of the abject into a sensual image of the beautiful.” (Joel Kuennen)

HD Video Loop, 3 Channel projection size: 8′ x 4.5′, 2010

Credits:
Directors: Meredith Zielke & Yoni Goldstein Production Manager: Elizabeth Cohen Camera Operator: Andrew Benz DIT: Robert Cauble Gaffer: Artem Avakian Best Boy: Sean Lowery Grips: Eliyahu Ungar-Sargon, Gwyneth Anderson Production Assistants: Tommy Heffron, Justyn Mainard, Jared Larson, Crispin Rosenkranz, Emily Buckler, Kathryn Grover, Emily Buckler, Chris Bradley, Amanda Eron, Rodion Galperin, Anna Kipervaser, Ronen Goldstein, Jess Turcios Make Up: Deanna Frost Special Effects Make Up: William Amaya, Jennifer Mosier Art Director: Jerzy Rose Pneumatics: Katrina Chamberlin Location provided by: Joseph Gheith Location Scout: Travis Wyche

Cast: Sebastian Alvarez, Stef Almeida, Misuzu Aoi, Nadav Assor, John Boss, Jefferson Dakota Brown, Sagar Budhe, Justin Cabrillos, Masha Chernyak, Noé Cuéllar, Erin Davette, Ehsan Ghoreshi, Elise Goldstein, Amanda Gutierrez, Jerry Heller, Nadia Hotait, Geoff Hughes, Joshua Johnson, Sharon Kluge, Kunal Kumar, Zihan Loo, Lauren Mardirosian, Hally Marlino, Jeff Matheis, Laura Meyer, Anisa Pashaj, Balta Peña, Cheryl Pope, Casilda Sanchez, Louis E. Sather, Jr., Lynn Stransky, Earl Smith, Lynn Stransky, Jaroslaw Studencki, Daniel Teafoe, Gregg Valentine, Roberto Vega-Morales, Joette Waters, Ryan Wilson, Collins Yearwood

On Set Photographers: Alexandra Dietz, Beverly Jensen, Rodion Galperin, Justyn Mainard, Academic Adviser: Frédéric Moffet

1 Channel Video installation / fashion art video, 2010

Credits
Featuring designs by Adam Van Eeckhout
DIRECTOR Zihan Loo
DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY Yoni Goldstein
LINE PRODUCER Joseph Carr
PERFORMER ONE Tian Shuai
PERFORMER TWO Tony Flannigan
CAMERA OPERATION Lawrence Daufenbach
GAFFER Robert Cauble
BEST BOY Jared Larson
DOLLY GRIP Justyn Mainard
PRODUCTION ASSISTANT Gwyneth Anderson
STYLING & MAKEUP Nika Vaughan | Adam Van Eeckhout
ART ASSISTANT Mako Fuwa
STILL PHOTOGRAPHY Cheng-Yung Kuo | Meredith Zielke
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Mary Van Eeckhout | Gene Van Eeckhout | Vera Hetland | I^3 Hypermedia

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Credits
A Performance and Installation by Liliya Lifanova and Sebastian Alvarez
Video by Yoni Goldstein
Camerawork by Yoni Goldstein, Meredith Zielke, and Lori Felker

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La Curación is an experimental ethnographic film sited in the volatile beauty of Ecuador’s volcanic capital, Quito, a nearby cluster of healing villages, and a fisherman’s wharf near the Colombian border. Told through a series of musings and personal narratives (an epileptic revolutionary, a fire-breathing shaman, a poet-physician, a campesino visionary), the film reveals deeply layered understandings of health, healing, and the body as a porous membrane.

Feature Length Experimental Ethnography, 2008

The Quito Film Collective connects students and scholars with global health researchers, medical students, and documentary makers from the Americas. Production was completed at the University of Michigan and The School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Credits
Direction/ Field Production/ Editing – Yoni Goldstein, Meredith Zielke
Production: The Quito Film Collective – Yoni Goldstein, Meredith Zielke, Sergio Huarcaya, Anica Madeo, Kyle Fish, Dana Kuhn, Gonzalo Escobar, Susan Fawcett
Executive Production: Patrick Schaller
Original Score: Breathe Owl Breathe and Drafted by Minotaurs

1 Channel Video installation / short film, 2010

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Credits
Concept and Art by Ben Fain
Moving image by Yoni Goldstein and Meredith Zielke
Additional Camerawork by Eliyahu Ungar-Sargon
Music by Ronen Goldstein

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G-Loc: Vivid Dreamlets / Beautiful Place is a three-channel video rebus assembled through a series of drownings, car crashes, scientifically induced supernatural phenomenae, confinement and disjuncted consciousness. Presented as a large scale, high definition video installation with holophonic sound and bibliographic notes, the piece arranges an open set of questions about signification, corporeality, and techno-sensual cosmologies.

Experimental Film / Installation, 2009

CREDITS:
direction/editing: Yoni Goldstein
additional cinematography / production: Meredith Zielke
sound: Noé Cuéllar, Yoni Goldstein, Joseph Michael Kramer and Chad Clark
animation: Gonzalo Alfonso Escobar Mora
performance: Sebastian Alvarez
voice overs: Irina Botea, Razvan Botea, Meredith Zielke Adam Rose, Noé Cuéllar, and Mahmoud Taie
installation: Yoni Goldstein, Meredith Zielke, Kat Scott Chris Frost, Lauren Mardirosian and Sebastian Alvarez
scientific imaging: Roberto Vega-Morales and William Gannon
offset printer operation: Andrew Blackley

Credits
Video and Performance by Katrina Chamberlin and James Kubie
Cinematography by Yoni Goldstein
Camera by Yoni Goldstein, Yating Hsu and Elise Goldstein

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An adaptation of an excerpt from William Gaddis’s 1955 novel of the same name by director Geoff Hughes. In line with the author’s intent, this narrative short criticizes frivolity in a world haunted by loss and filled with losers.

“There is here everything imaginable in the way of confusion, darkness and horror… I know from personal experience that in this place there is neither piety nor charity. Faith is absent; there is nothing holy, nothing just, nothing human. Friendship, modesty and decency are unknown. Houses drip with lies. The hope of a future life is considered an illusion; virtue is regarded as a proof of stupidity, and prostitution leads to fame.” — Petrarch, from his letters, Sine Titulo.

Credits
Director – Geoff Hughes
Director of Photography – Yoni Goldstein
Camera – Yoni Goldstein and Eliyahu Ungar-Sargon

Magicicada is a three-part animated cycle constructed with found natural objects, molten cicada exoskeletons, LED lights, dead insects, and lichen beds from the Moravian countryside. The series’ production mirrors the cicada brood cycle of 17 years, an emergence period synchronized to mathematical regularity for survival.

A 17 year stop motion animation project, 2007, 2024, 2041

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This piece was produced collaboratively with animator, sculptor, puppeteer, and fellow SAIC’er Carey Richards, at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague.

Credits
Director – Yoni Goldstein, Carey Richards
Editor – Yoni Goldstein
Score – Ronen Goldstein
Sound Design – Yoni Goldstein

Our School is a critical study of the Detroit Public School System through the eyes of high school students and their teachers. Interleaving the prismatic complexities of teenage life with the structural narrative of a once prosperous, but deeply segregated, industrial city, Our School seeks to negotiate the racial, economic, and systematic problems of urban public education.

Feature Documentary, 2009

Credits
Direction/ Production – Oren Goldenberg
Editing – Yoni Goldstein, Meredith Zielke

In The Body Parlor, both man and sheep as combined sacrificial bodies become subjects of biological investigation. As symbols of ritual sacrifice, they are bodies that give of themselves. In discovering new forms of health-care (regenerative medicine) and tissue engineering (such as stem cell research), the body becomes sacrificial material for the greater purpose of a social good. The performers employ the material objects, either as products of or as extensions of the body as a way of exploring giving from one’s self in sacrifice.

Credits
Performance: Katrina Chamberlin and James Kubie
Direction: Frederic Moffet
Director of Photography: Yoni Goldstein
Additional Camera and Field Recording: Meredith Zielke

Dual channel installation in Hallein, Austria, a former satellite labor and displaced person camp outside Dachau. In this project, I constructed an “eruv” – a ritual perimeter made from string and traditionally demarcates Jewish neighborhoods according to Sabbath law. This boundary line followed the perimeter of the village and was projected on east and west facing screens of an atelier in the local salt mine. Text in both English and German was provided for the audience articulating my attempt at re-Judaizing this rural village in lower Austria in relation to my own family history and new expressions of Jewish diaspora and rootlessness.

This projects lifts the medieval German (Lutheran) / Latin positing, Dic Cur Hic, “Say, when asked, why you are here.” I found this both at the heart of Libeniz’s moral order (define your situation) and in the correspondence between Walter Benjamin and the German scholar of Jewish mysticism, Gershom Scholem. “Here” for me was the transitive position of the Semitic other, the encountering of a stranger.

2 Channel Video installation / performance, 2009

Credits
A Video Installation by Yoni Goldstein
Guidance: Anna Konik, Clemens Kowalski, Ahmad Habash, Steven Matthewson, Mareika Weber
Production: Kamil Malinowsky, Zora Rux, Kevjn Kelly, Beste Erener, Hanna Hofsteatter
2009 Internationalen Sommerakademie Für Bildende Kunst in Salzburg

An interview of gay Lebanese philosopher and writer Raja Halwani on issues relating to Semitic desire, the taboo of Palestinian / Jewish sexual relations, the taboo of homosexuality in Palestine and Israel, the attraction/repulsion impulse in relation to the Other.

Credits
A video installation by Yoni Goldstein and Edward Salem

From the upcoming album, “Old / New Baby” by Luke Winslow-King. Video by Yoni Goldstein, Ji Un Choi, and Ronen Goldstein

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Cousin Kasyte is a diaristic journey into the Lithuanian heartland in search of roots, history, and family.

Stashu Kybartas always wondered about his past, his family. The nuns who raised him didn’t know, his relatives didn’t want to discuss it; everyone in his childhood feared to look back at that old country. It wasn’t until the early 90′s and the fall of the Soviet Union, when Kybartas was allowed to cross borders and make forays into unmapped farmlands and disappeared villages. Somewhere there, he finds Kasyte in a veritable anthill of missing cousins. The dynamic between the two reveals a culture that built itself around the earth, animals and crops – the inherited sum of some ancient mode of survival.

Cousin Kasyte was shot on location in Lithuania by Stashu Kybartas and edited and co-produced by Yoni Goldstein at Standing Point Films in 2005.

Credits
Direction / Production / Direction of Photography – Stashu Kybartas
Co-Production/ Editing/ Script Consulting – Yoni Goldstein
Score – Shaun Williams

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Video Excerpts

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Click here to view the embedded video.

Credits
Direction/ Field Production/ Editing – Yoni Goldstein
Executive Production: Patrick Schaller
Music by Breathe Owl Breathe (Micah Middaugh, Andrea Moreno-Beals, Trevor Hobbes, and Susan Fawcett)

Chicago-based artist Ben Fain uses the traditional parade as the perfect and unexpected platform for his performance art and installation. As a participant in this year’s 12th Annual North Halsted Halloween Parade on October 31st, 2008 – Fain presents his latest project, “The Rat City Parade.” The piece consists of custom choreography including 70 dancers dressed in full body rat costumes that will incorporate movements based on the behaviors of certain insect swarm behaviors and electron particles. As with all parades “The Rat City Parade” delivers a float to accompany the dancers, complete with a fully furnished bedroom scene, a large rotating pizza pyramid, and a live musical performance by Chicago’s own Bucket Boys. All of this comes together to create an extravagant, nightmarish sculpture and performance meant to cause bewilderment and mystify the viewers and will act as the point of the Rat-themed parade.

Ben Fain has commissioned Yoni Goldstein with Meredith Zielke (sound) and Gonzalo Escobar to create a multicamera video documentation of the spectacle.

Credits
Direction/ Field Production – Yoni Goldstein
Field Recording – Meredith Zielke
Production Assistance – Gonzalo Escobar

Credits
Direction / Production – Yoni Goldstein
Music – Patrick Elkins, Ian Fulcher

Feature documentary, 2007

In 2004, Laurie White envisioned of a film showing Zeitouna’s learning as a model for others. Refusing To Be Enemies is Zeitouna’s story, a 58-minute documentary targeted for national and international distribution as an inspiring educational tool. White captures both the pain and the joy inherent in dialogue’s mastery.

Credits
Director / Producer – Laurie White
Directors of Photography – Meredith Zielke, Yoni Goldstein
Editors – Yoni Goldstein, Meredith Zielke, Shaun Williams

Click here to view the embedded video.

Set in the West African capital city of Accra, Ghana, these two documentary films explore how women from many different ages, educational levels, and class backgrounds speak about health risks, medicines, and concepts of beauty and the body. The stories of individual women weighing their options are told directly to the camera through this revealing collection of characters and locations, from blood tonic stands in open air markets to herbalists to spiritual healers. These documentaries place the views of medical practitioners side by side with those of ordinary women, sewing students, and traditionalists as they discuss different care options for maternity, childbirth, abortion, and / or chronic diseases. Doctors, herbalists, and faith healers also have their say as the camera captures them in action. If All Else Fails and Excuse Me To Say weave a complex web of options and opinions that inform Ghanaian women as they face decisions about managing their own health in a time of ever increasing costs and risks.

From the forty hours of footage shot in Accra, Ghana over eight weeks in 2001, as part of the second summer session of the Women’s Health in the City of Accra Project, a transnational ethnographic research seminar sponsored by the Ford Foundation, the University of Ghana, and multiple generous UM units — Arts of Citizenship, CAAS, History, IRWG, LSA, Obstetrics & Gynecology, OVPR, and the Program for Society and Medicine.

Credits
Production – Nancy Hunt
Direction – R. Lane Clark
Lead Editor – Yoni Goldstein
Additional Editing – Meredith Zielke

Kamrowski moved to Ann Arbor in 1948 to teach art, remarking; “If I stayed in New York I’d either be very rich or I’d be dead. I’ve outlived most of my contemporaries.”

Outside his studio is a garden of wind machines, sculptures, fantastic beaded wooden creatures, mosaics, and dancing, spinning reflective mirrors. In the brief time that we shot the film, especially the time we spent with him in his studio, his age and his frailty and physical incapacity were apparent, if unspoken. It is not until Goldstein reworked the piece in 2004 that he saw it fit to give Kamrowski the voice of the late poet / publisher James Laughlin of New Directions Books. In doing so, Golstein made this work fiction, but perhaps a more emotionally precise fiction that speaks more to the recent loss of his grandparents.

This piece was shot on an old Scopic 16mm, layered with the voice of the late poet / publisher James Laughlin of New Directions Books. Kamrowski passed away recently, his work and this film was showcased at the Chelsea River Gallery.

Credits
Direction / Production – Yoni Goldstein, Jessica Hill
Voice Over – James Laughlin

Co-directed by Yoni Goldstein and Max Sussman and scored by Ronen Goldstein, the film focuses on the now-destroyed Technology Center (also known as the Performance Network), a former factory and warehouse space appropriated by struggling artist into a pirate utopia in a city with encroaching economic development and skyrocketing living costs. In 2003, this space was raided, its inhabitant evicted in the middle of winter, the building sold, bulldozed, and finally burned to the ground in a mysterious firestorm that engulfed the entire city block.

The film takes its title from graffiti left on the building after the artists’ eviction and the demolition plans became known. It read, “Whatever you destroy, we’ll create it again.”

Whatever You Destroy premiered at the international Ann Arbor Film Festival and received the Lawther/Graff No Violence Award: to honor “the film that best demonstrates non-violent artistic communication. It is presented to the filmmaker whose film refuses to feed off fear and that successfully creates a space that is life affirming.” The film was screened at the 6th annual Allied Media Conference on June 18-20th in Bowling Green, Ohio by Rooftop Films and at the Lost Film Fest.

Credits
Direction/ Production – Yoni Goldstein, Max Sussman
Score – Ronen Goldstein