Between Body And Space

About this event

A screening of the program Between Body and Space and the Q&A with Nataša Prosenc Stearns consists of films, videos, video installations, artwork for a contemporary opera and a trailer for her recent film ANOMIE, which will screen as part of the Queens World Film Festival on November 9th.

The selection of works is drawn from her recent retrospective curated by the Slovenian Center for Contemporary Art at the Slovenian Cinematheque and is made possible in part by the Slovenian Ministry of Culture.

Nataša Prosenc Stearns is known for expanding the vocabulary of moving images through a practice that merges narrative cinema with visual abstraction, spatial experimentation, and photo-collage printing. Central motifs in her work include subconscious worlds and identities in contemporary alienating environments, the materiality of the body, and the elemental force of water.

About the Artist

Nataša Prosenc Stearns earned her BA at the Academy of Arts and Design in Ljubljana, Slovenia. She moved to Los Angeles on a Fulbright Grant for her MFA at California Institute of the Arts, where she studied under the renowned artist Nancy Buchanan and filmmaker Thom Andersen. Her work has been shown internationally, including at the Venice Biennale and has been screened at festivals around the world.

Artistic Vision

Arriving in the U.S. during a time when artists from the former Yugoslavia were often defined by reductive tropes of war, exile, or Balkan exoticism, Prosenc Stearns deliberately resisted such expectations. Instead her work consistently favors an introspective, meditative, and sometimes surreal approach. Characters in her films confront realities shaped by media, mythology, and memory—haunted not only by their pasts, but also by the versions of themselves, society expects them to perform.

Dr. Holly Willis, Chair of the Media Arts Department at the California School of Cinematic Arts, observes that: “Nataša Prosenc Stearns is a bit of an anomaly in the international contemporary video art scene. Whereas the focus of much recent work tends to be conceptual and highly aware of its specificity and place of enunciation, Prosenc Stearns pursues transcendent themes that extend well beyond the moment of her artwork’s existence.”

“Nataša Prosenc Stearns entire oeuvre creates alternative models of experiential potential, which, with the courage and perseverance, dismantle, rework, and transmute established representational systems of sensing, thinking, and acting. She offers an experiential dynamo powered by elemental femininity. This subsumes and transcends the elemental forces of nature, as well as national and cultural boundaries; it opens a planetary perspective of our individual and collective living—together.” - Dr. Maja Manojlović, media and film theorist and lecturer at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).

About Queens World Film Festival

Founded in 2010 and nurtured into existence by Queens residents and filmmakers Donald Preston Cato and Katha Cato, the Queens World Film Initiative, Inc. became a 501c3 non-profit in 2014. The mission of Queens World is to foster a vibrant and inclusive film culture in Queens while introducing our local filmmakers to the world. Through educational programs, Internship partnerships, and other immersive film centric experiences, we provide individuals with opportunities to share their ideas, develop analog, digital, visual, and performing arts projects, and connect with a supportive community. For more information on Queens World: Katha Cato - kathacato@gmail.com

Contact

Press & Screening Inquiries

Katha Cato, Queens World Film Festival

917 562 9648 | kathacato@gmail.com | queensworldfilmfestival.org

Artist Inquiries

Nataša Prosenc Stearns

natasa@natasastearns.com | natasastearns.com

Venue

Stuart Cinema

stuartcinema.com