The KJCC will host a roundtable discussion moderated by KJCC Director Jordana Mendelson, featuring film scholars Jo Labanyi (NYU), Carlos Saldaña (NYU), and Andrew Uroskie (NYU), along with the curator and architect Lluís Alexandre Casanovas Blanco (Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid).

This roundtable is held in conjunction with the Museum of the Moving Image's exhibition "Cinema of Sensations: The Never-Ending Screen of Val del Omar," which will feature a day-long event of screenings and talks on September 9. To register and for more information: https://movingimage.us/series/elements-of-cinema/

Co-sponsored by Archivo Val del Omar, Max Estrella Gallery, and Museum of the Moving Image

Reception to follow

Free and open to the public. No pre-registration necessary

Jo Labanyi (NYU)
Jo Labanyi came to NYU in 2006 after a career in the UK. She is the founder of the Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, of which she remains deputy editor, and of the Journal of Romance Studies. She was elected to the British Academy in 2005. A specialist in the cultural history of modern Spain, her fields of research are literature, film, gender studies, popular culture, memory studies, and the history of emotions. She has co-edited and co-authored volumes that rethink the field of Spanish cultural history—as in the co-edited Companion to Spanish Cinema (Blackwell, 2012) and Engaging the Emotions in Spanish Culture and History (Vanderbilt UP, 2016; Spanish translation 2018); and the co-authored Cultural History of Modern Literatures in Spain (Polity Press, forthcoming 2022). She is the author of Spanish Literature (2010), part of Oxford UP’s Very Short Introduction series. As Professor Emerita at NYU, she will work on two projects: an oral history of cinema-going in 1940s and 1950s Spain, and a monograph on 1940s Spanish cinema entitled Reading Cinema under Dictatorship.

Lluís Alexandre Casanovas Blanco (Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid)
Lluís Alexandre Casanovas Blanco (Ripoll, Girona, 1985) is an architect, curator and critic. He holds a PhD from Princeton University and serves as scientific advisor and curator of architecture at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid. Casanovas Blanco combines his work as an architect with curatorship and cultural projects. In 2016, he was general curator of the Oslo Architecture Triennale together with the After Belonging Agency. He was part of the curatorial team of Niño de Elche. Auto Sacramental Invisible (2020-2021) and Communicating Vessels. Collection: 1881-2021 (2021) at the Museo Reina Sofía. He is currently working on the exhibition Lo Animal en España (2024) at the Fundación Cerezales, León, and José Val del Omar: una Técnica con T mayúscula (2024) at C3A, Córdoba.

Andrew Uroskie (SUNY Stony Brook)
Andrew V. Uroskie specializes in modern and contemporary art and the moving image. Broadly informed by psychoanalysis, phenomenology and post-structuralist philosophy, his work focuses on how durational media have helped to reframe traditional models of aesthetic production, exhibition, spectatorship, and objecthood. Uroskie’s research into the history of expanded cinema was awarded the Chancellor’s Dissertation Fellowship at UC Berkeley, and he has held research fellowships at the Townsend Center for the Humanities and the Stanford Humanities Laboratory. Uroskie is affiliated with Stony Brook’s Graduate Program in Philosophy and the Arts, and the graduate concentration in Media, Art, Culture and Technology. Winner of 2018 Creative Capital / Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers book award, his forthcoming study, The Kinetic Imaginary: Robert Breer and the Animation of Postwar Art, attempts to revise our understanding of Kinetic Art through an investigation of the interdisciplinary practices of Robert Breer and his milieu.

Carlos Saldaña (NYU)
Carlos Saldaña is a film curator, archivist, and Fulbright Student in the NYU Moving Image Archiving and Preservation program. He has coordinated digitization projects of 16mm and Super-8 films during his studies at Elías Querejeta Zine Eskola, and pursued his training at the Museum of Modern Art, Cinemateca Portuguesa, Third World Newsreel, and the Archivo José Val del Omar. He is the editor of four books, including the collected writings of Indian artist Mani Kaul and the first monograph dedicated to US-American filmmakers Nathaniel Dorsky and Jerome Hiler. He is a member of the programming team at Xcèntric-CCCB (Barcelona) and has guest-curated film series and screenings at Anthology Film Archives, Filmoteca de Catalunya, Filmoteca Española, CGAI, Nomadica at LABA, Festival Punto de Vista, the Museum of the Moving Image, ZumZeig, Círculo de Bellas Artes and Tabakalera.