Limits of Control: Films by OJOBOCA

Under the evocative moniker of OJOBOCA—literally “eye-mouth”—Berlin-based filmmakers Anja Dornieden and Juan David González Monroy devise confoundingly cryptic, slyly subversive works that play on the slippery relationships of power between image and language, materiality and virtuality, fact and myth, and the cinematic apparatus and its audience. Utilizing a wide array of analog filmmaking techniques, such as trompe l’oeil photographic effects, while simultaneously exploiting conventional tropes of documentary film, such as voiceover narration and on-screen titling, Dornieden and González Monroy spin discrete visual worlds of labyrinthine intricacy and nonsense narratives of Borgesian dimension that nonetheless exude the auratic attraction of the real. Rigorous and playful in equal measure, their films comprise one of the most idiosyncratically beautiful bodies of work in contemporary avant-garde cinema. On the occasion of the New York premiere of their latest short, Instant Life, at this year’s Prismatic Ground festival, the Museum welcomes the filmmakers in person to present three programs of short- and feature-length work, as well as their delightful rotating-screen, slide-projector performance External Shudders.