Visual Arts – filmmaking, photography, moving images
Based in Minneapolis, Rini Yun Keagy is a filmmaker and moving image artist whose work is rooted in research and in the experience of diaspora and multi-ethnic flux. In 16mm film and video, sometimes using archival sources, her work speculates on historical and future narratives while invoking surreal landscapes, the sensorial body at rest and in motion, and the racial imaginary.
Her 2017 film Ordinal (SW/NE) focuses on a disease striking California’s Central Valley and has important resonances with the current health crisis. In the work-in-progress film North/Central, Rini focuses her lens on the contemporary American setting of a tract of land where her mixed-heritage Guatemalan-American father raises cattle and explores how personal and collective trauma can be imbued in inanimate objects, living beings, and place.
While at the Anderson Center, Rini experimented for the first time in large format photography, observing the surrounding landscape and tower views. Some of her photos engaged performative gestures of the body to conjure notions of presence and absence. Rini also played with the staging of found objects from nature, paper sculptures, archival objects or symbolic heirlooms brought with her to the residency.
Rini led and participated in a virtual presentation and discussion on Friday, October 9 with the Red Wing Women’s Art History Club.