Black Hole Radio

Black Hole Radio is an installation that consists of taped confessions of callers of the New York City Phone Confession Line and video images. The Phone Confession Line is based on anonymous callers ringing to confess on things they had done or thought like adultery, theft, murder or regrets. Thereafter anybody could call and listen to the confessions. Although making a confession was free, listening to a confession costs money. After Cohen got his hands on the confessions, he used them as an audio heartbeat to accompany video-images of ever...

Just Hold Still

In his New York City landscape, Cohen finds inspiration in disturbance. Looking to life for rhythm and to architecture for state of mind, he locates simple mysteries. Just Hold Still is comprised of an interconnected series of short works and collaborations that explore the gray area between documentary, narrative, and experimental genres.

Le bled (Buildings in a Field)

A collaboration between Jem Cohen with writer Luc Sante made in Tangier, Morocco, a city where neither of us had ever been. En route from the airport to the city center, we found ourselves amazed by the landscape outside of the car windows; a massive construction project under way in all directions. While not in itself unusual, we were by struck dumb by the epic scale and seemingly incomprehensible plan of the development and were drawn to return together to this puzzling zone. This project was commissioned by TAMAAS, a small foundation base...

Chain

In Chain, actual malls, theme parks, hotels and corporate centers worldwide are joined into a monolithic superlandscape that shapes and circumscribes the lives of two women. One is a businesswoman researching the international theme park industry for her company. The other is a young drifter, illegally living and occasionally working in a shopping mall.

4:44 (from her house home)

A personal, poetic approach to narrative, originally shot on 8mm film and mastered to ¾” video. Created in collaboration with Gabriel Cohen

Counting

An associative collection of visual impressions across fifteen chapters: a seagull in Porto, political posters in New York, an abstract painting in St. Petersburg, an abandoned video shop in Cairo and cats everywhere you look.