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Social Guidance
4-channel video installation with archival materials
May 9 - 23, 2024 at the Visual Studies Workshop as part of their “In Dialogue” Series curated by Tara Nelson
Social Guidance pairs Sarah Friedland’s Movement Exercises Trilogy with social guidance films and videos from the VSW archives. Movement Exercises deconstructs and revises the choreographic vocabularies of exercises practiced across home, work, and school spaces. The trilogy consists of three short films: Home Exercises (2017), Drills (2020), and Trust Exercises (2022). In making this trilogy, Friedland looked to social guidance and instructional films — from the home exercise video to safety instructionals — as moving image forms which stage choreographies that attempt to mold, train, and make-up the social body. Her trilogy both emulates their structures, while arranging mutations and revisions of the found choreographies presented within them. Through choreographic deconstruction and revision, her trilogy asks: how else might we move together? Finding resonances between the found movements in VSW’s archive and the choreographies performed within her trilogy, Social Guidance’s four-channel installation considers the choreo-political work of exercises, drills, and instructions for American moving bodies, both past and present. While the top projection presents Movement Exercises in a loop, the bottom triptych of monitors displays fragments and full works from the VSW archive as footnotes which annotate the relationship between choreography and the work of the social guidance film and video.
In this exhibition, the term “Social Guidance” refers to moving images used to instruct individuals and communities in social behaviors encouraged or expected by the institutions, workplaces, schools, and nation state to which they “belong.” With titles such as Duck and Cover, Alone at Home, and Speaking Effectively: To One or One Thousand, these films are designed to instruct audiences in supposedly beneficial or productive social practices, indexing the embodied conventions and imagined futures of their times. Social guidance films and videos could be checked out of the library for instructional use in workplace and educational training. VSW’s archive contains thousands of these titles, which were previously held by the Rochester Public Library and local universities. The film canisters still hold the traces of library cards, often accompanied by pamphlets and texts providing written guides and discussion questions to enhance lessons. Examples of these pamphlets line the back wall of the installation space. Like the source materials used by Friedland for the found movements performed in her films, these in-canister texts appear almost as movement scores for their reader-viewers to perform and emulate as they become progressively better social subjects.
Social Guidance examines the relationship between the moving image forms which instruct our bodies and selves, and the proposition of the exercises contained therein: that by moving and acting together, repeatedly, we both create and recreate the social body.