NEWS: Bridge Video Announces Film & Video Selections for the 2026 Festival of Holes at SITE/less Chicago
NEWS
Bridge Video Announces Film & Video Selections for the 2026 Festival of Holes at SITE/less Chicago
Bridge Video today announces the film and video works selected for presentation as part of the 2026 Festival of Holes, taking place October 30–31 at SITE/less Chicago.
This year’s program brings together nine experimental moving-image works by artists and filmmakers working across film, animation, performance, archival practice, choreography, appropriation, and expanded approaches to documentary and narrative construction.
The selected program includes work by Alex Sherman; Brandon Bauer; Monica Duncan and Senem Pirler; Yeon Jin Kim; Gia Abucejo; Brian R Donnelly; Esme Laam; Lagha Ghavam and Mohsen Pouryousefian; and Sam Digges Hunter.
Several of the selected works have previously appeared through Bridge Video’s online programming, while the majority will be presented to Bridge audiences for the first time at the Festival of Holes. With few exceptions, works selected for Festival of Holes are held from Bridge Video’s regular streaming schedule until after their festival presentation.
The complete selected program has a running time of approximately 72 minutes. Additional screening information, program order, schedules, participating artists, and Festival of Holes events will be announced separately.
Please note that the program is subject to change.
2026 FESTIVAL OF HOLES — BRIDGE VIDEO SELECTIONS
The Slip
Directed by Alex Sherman
Runtime: 16:40
A sidelong glance into Los Angeles, The Slip unravels in the space between reality and cinematic construction.
Working through the visual and atmospheric language of neo-noir, the film uses familiar cinematic conventions to imbue human interactions, pedestrian movement, and landscapes with an accumulating sense of intrigue and expectation.
About the Director
Alex Sherman is a filmmaker, visual artist, and performance artist whose work examines precarity, failure, and absurdity in the commonplace through investigation and gesture. She received her Master’s degree in Film Directing from California Institute of the Arts.
Social Media Delivers People (After Serra & Schoolman)
Directed by Brandon Bauer
Runtime: 2:43
Social Media Delivers People critically examines the role of social media in the commodification of its users. Drawing inspiration from Richard Serra and Carlotta Schoolman’s 1973 work Television Delivers People, Bauer reimagines its critique for the digital age.
Through AI-spoken text, restrained imagery, and corporate motivational music, the work considers the mechanics of surveillance capitalism, where engagement is monetized, personal data is harvested, and attention becomes currency. The video asks viewers to reconsider their own participation in systems that increasingly transform communication and connection into products.
About the Director
Brandon Bauer is an artist, educator, curator, and Associate Professor of Art at St. Norbert College in Wisconsin. His work examines democracy, nuclear abolition, terrorism, and the climate crisis through photography, video, graphics, installation, archives, and ephemera. His work has been exhibited and screened internationally and is held in public and private collections. As an educator, Bauer focuses on the intersection of art and democracy through collaborative community-based projects.
Previously featured by Bridge Video.
Tears for Lost Frequencies (I)
Directed by Monica Duncan and Senem Pirler
Runtime: 5:06
Tears for Lost Frequencies explores our increasingly inseparable relationship with plastic through improvisation.
Beginning with the presence of microplastics found in human tears, the work considers plastic not as something outside of nature but as a material that has become embedded within it—and within us. Microplastics become material witnesses to experiences of grief, including hearing loss, while opening a speculative space for thinking about healing, contamination, and involuntary collaboration between human bodies and synthetic matter.
About the Directors
Monica Duncan and Senem Pirler have collaborated since 2017 on audiovisual performances investigating everyday objects, agency, and queer potentiality. Their collaborative work has appeared at festivals and venues including Revolutions Per Minute, Kuala Lumpur Experimental Film, Video & Music, Transient Visions, Light Matter, Athens International Film + Video, Chicago Underground Film Festival, Festival ECRÃ, Fisura, and CURRENTS New Media Festival.
They have been artists-in-residence at Signal Culture, PACT Zollverein, the Institute for Electronic Arts, and LMCC at Governors Island. Their audiovisual performance Surface Connection was presented in the 61st Ann Arbor Film Festival’s Expanded Cinema program, and the pair received a 2024 New Works Artist Residency for their multimedia performance installation Plasticity.
Zoonomia
Directed by Yeon Jin Kim
Runtime: 7:10
Zoonomia is an imaginative investigation into how the world might have evolved had events followed a slightly different trajectory.
Through hybrids of existing organisms, the return of extinct species, and unexpected motivations and interactions, Kim constructs an alternate evolutionary world in which recognizable natural systems give way to new and unpredictable possibilities.
About the Director
Yeon Jin Kim is a South Korean-born visual artist and filmmaker based in New York City. Her multidisciplinary practice encompasses animated films made from miniature sets, cut-paper works, drawings, and plastic quilts inspired by the Korean tradition of Jogakbo.
Her work has been presented in solo exhibitions in Seoul, New York, and Pennsylvania, while her films have screened at venues and festivals including the Philadelphia Asian Film Festival, New Filmmakers New York, Blow-Up Arthouse Film Fest Chicago, and the Glimmerglass Film Festival. Her work was also included in the book 50 Contemporary Women Artists.
Kim has participated in numerous artist residencies, including Yaddo, Sculpture Space, Wave Hill, Abrons Arts Center, I-Park, and the Saltonstall Foundation, and has received support from the New York State Council on the Arts. She currently teaches at Binghamton University, SUNY.
Previously featured by Bridge Video.
Ocean Screensaver
Directed by Gia Abucejo
Runtime: 11:36
Past and future worlds collide in Ocean Screensaver, a meandering fairytale centered on a coveted and increasingly mythological object: the screensaver.
Drawing loosely upon mythologized and imperialist narratives surrounding the Philippines’ Pearl of Lao Tzu, the film investigates the construction of narratives, competing ideas of truth, and possibilities for reclamation across repurposed waters.
About the Director
Gia Abucejo is an interdisciplinary artist and researcher working across film and video, installation, writing, and animation. Her work has been presented nationally and internationally in galleries, festivals, and performance spaces.
Her first video work, Shield Ambiance, received the award for Best Imaginative Transformation: Exceptional Storytelling in Experimental Video at the 2023 Feminist Border Arts Film Festival. She has participated in the Mattress Factory’s Summer School: State of the Sky cohort, where she worked with contemporary archival practices and solar darkroom techniques, and was selected for an Art & Engagement Fellowship at Art on the Block NYC.
Abucejo works in archives in New York City and holds a Bachelor’s degree in Film & Media Studies and History of Art & Architecture from the University of Pittsburgh.
Previously featured by Bridge Video.
Goin’ Down The Road
Directed by Brian R Donnelly
Runtime: 4:11
Goin’ Down The Road is part of an ongoing project navigating the city of Toronto through fragments of popular films.
Taking advantage of cinema’s frequent unfaithfulness to actual geography, Donnelly uses dialogue cues, coincidence, and location to allow scenes from otherwise unrelated films to intersect and redirect one another. Closely cropped professional footage is composited over contemporary wide-angle video, creating a fractured document of the city and the ways it has changed over several decades.
This Festival of Holes selection represents the third iteration of the evolving project.
About the Director
Brian R Donnelly is a Toronto-based visual artist born in 1979. He holds a BFA in Painting from OCAD University. His work centers on questions of identity and its distortion and has been exhibited internationally since 2007. Donnelly began experimenting with and presenting video-based work in 2017.
The Inherit
Runtime: 9:14
The Inherit follows kudzu alongside the footsteps of a ghost draped in chainmail as it haunts the landscape.
As the overgrowth becomes increasingly overwhelming, a group begins harvesting and processing the vine while the ghost’s narrative gradually disintegrates. Introduced to the United States from East Asia more than a century ago to combat erosion caused by deforestation, kudzu carries its own complicated history of human intervention in natural systems. Once promoted as a tool of environmental stewardship, it is now commonly treated as an invasive nuisance across the American South.
About the Director
Sam Digges Hunter (they/them) is a video and installation artist exploring the intersection of storytelling, material culture, and speculative futures. Their researched-based approach reshapes historical narratives into mythical retellings, weaving together material exploration and community engagement. Through this interplay of video, objects, and collaborative processes, their work investigates the complexities of inheritance and renewal, offering a space for reflection on the histories we carry and the futures we imagine.
Born and raised in the Southern United States, Sam received their BFA in Studio Art with an emphasis in Art History from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Currently, Sam is a student in the SCA's Master of Fine Arts in Interdisciplinary Arts program.
the archivist is dying
Directed by Esme Laam
Runtime: 8:29
A ghost sifts through centuries of footage in an attempt to piece together a memory.
Using archival moving images, manipulated photographs, poetry, and sound, the archivist is dying constructs—and repeatedly disrupts—a remembered world. Drawing from sources including the American Folklife Center Archive, Alabama Department of Archives and History, Internet Archive, Prelinger Archives, Black Film Archives, YouTube, and the Los Angeles Public Library, the film explores what the filmmaker describes as the “disturbed familiar”: memory assembled through interruption.
The film presents images of Black life that are often gentle and joyous while remaining subject to continual disruption and threat.
About the Director
Esme Laam is a poet and filmmaker from Baltimore, Maryland. They hold a BFA in Film Production from Chapman University’s Dodge College of Film and Media Arts. Their work has been recognized by the YoungArts Foundation, The Baltimore Sun, and the Alliance for Young Artists & Writers.
Frequently concerned with the inner worlds of Black women, Laam works through magical realism to bring together horror, grief, tenderness, and adolescence in an approach they describe as “tenderhorror.”
Inhale
Directed by Lagha Ghavam and Mohsen Pouryousefian
Runtime: 6:43
A young woman is suspended in emotional limbo after years of social suppression in Iran.
She remains caught in stillness as life echoes faintly around her and distant explosions interrupt her isolation. Attempts to move forward are repeatedly constrained by forces beyond her control. As her body gradually dissolves into the natural world and the seasons move from winter toward spring, she remains caught in silence and solitude.
Created in the aftermath of Iran’s 2022 Women, Life, Freedom movement, Inhale uses contemporary dance, performance, and a deliberately distant third-person camera to examine numbness, grief, observation, isolation, and the psychological consequences of suppressed revolutionary movements.
About the Directors
Mohsen Pouryousefian is an Iranian filmmaker, editor, photographer, and cinematographer born in Tehran. A graduate of the University of Applied Science and Technology in film editing, he began his filmmaking practice through the Alternative Cinema Workshop led by Iranian filmmaker Mohammad Shirvani. His first short film, Premature, was released in 2021 and selected for festivals including the Tehran International Short Film Festival. He has since worked extensively as both a cinematographer and editor while developing experimental and alternative approaches to filmmaking.
Lagha Ghavam is an interdisciplinary Iranian artist based in Tehran whose work spans acting, performance, choreography, and experimental filmmaking. She holds a BA in Theatre Directing and is pursuing studies in Choreography and Performance at JLU University in Germany. She is the founder of Reclaim The Movement, an underground dance workshop in Tehran supporting emerging artists and experimentation with contemporary movement practices. Her work has received international recognition and scholarship support, including opportunities connected with ImPulsTanz in Vienna and the Centre National de la Danse in Paris.
Together, Ghavam and Pouryousefian describe Inhale as a visual exploration of what remains after protest, grief, and silence when language itself becomes insufficient.
Festival of Holes 2026
October 30–31, 2026
SITE/less, Chicago
Additional Festival of Holes program information, schedules, participating artists, performances, and ticketing information will be announced through Bridge and participating Festival partners.
