Kersti Jan Werdal
6 Films in 5 days / Jan 14th - 18th / 2024
We hosted the work of the American filmmaker and photographer Kersti Jan Werdal.
For five days, the artist's films were screened inside the gallery space and on the website, one per day.
FILM LIST / INFO
DAY01 / I CANNOT NOW RECALL
S 16mm to digital, sound, color 15min, 2023
In I Cannot Now Recall, Kersti Jan Werdal presents a collection of Yvonne Rainer’s dreams, selected by the filmmaker from Rainer’s journals. Through choice and abstraction, Werdal produces a shared psychic landscape that is as expansive as it is anxiou
DAY02 / LAKE FOREST PARK
S 16mm to digital, sound, color, 60min, 2021
Filmed on location in Northwest Washington, Lake Forest Park (un)winds through a coming-of-age tale of a group of friends dealing with a mysterious shared loss. The film explores collective and individual grief tinged with existential confusions.
DAY03 / PROMENADE
S 16mm to digital, sound, color, 15min15sec, 2019
Promenade is an observational documentary portrait depicting a choreographer's process. The edit addresses how performance -- an artform often argued to only exist in its precise moment -- may be captured and experienced again in moving image.
DAY04 / FANSY PLACE / NIGHT RUN
S 16mm to digital, sound, color,
Fansy Place, a leyyer from Judy to Oliver.
Memory of a night.
DAY05 / TEST PIECE
S 16mm to digital, sound, color, 19min, 2025
Fansy Place, a leyyer from Judy to Oliver.
Memory of a night.
Kersti Jan Werdal’s Test Piece dismantles cinematic conventions through a disjunctive, non-narrative layering of images, sounds, and text. From an archer in a natural landscape to a theatrical dark void where sounds are described rather than heard, and finally to a diverse collection of source texts narrated in a park, Test Piece constructs a dynamic and evolving cinematic space that invites viewers to critically engage with the film’s conceptual and intellectual potential.
Kersti Jan Werdal is a filmmaker and photographer from Seattle, Washington.
Demanding the audience take a direct role while viewing, her films typically situate specific plot-points opaque, as she pivots away from the expository. Working within the film essay, doc-fiction hybrid, and installation format, her films often center around collective memory, hidden truths within cultures that experience(d) erasure, and place.
BA in Sociocultural Anthropology from Columbia University
MFA in Film/Video from California Institute of the Arts
