Screening + Book release: Moyra Davey

Join us at Zita Folkets Bio, Birger Jarlsgatan 37 for an afternoon with book release, film screening and conversation with the Canadian artist, filmmaker and author Moyra Davey. Organized by the publisher Filmögon in collaboration with Index.

During the event, Filmögon will release Davey’s essay collection Kartotek [Index Cards] in Swedish translation by Emma Hatt and screen her two latest films: Four [чотири] (2025) and Forks & Spoons (2024). After the screening, there will be a conversation between Filmögon and Davey, followed by readings by both the author herself and the translator. Kartotek will be available during the event at a special price.

Free admission, but please RVSP to info@filmogon.se.

Program
2 PM Screening: Four [чотири] (33 min, 2025) + Forks & Spoons (26 min, 2024)
3 PM Conversation between Moyra Davey and Filmögon followed by readings from the book by Davey and translator Emma Hatt

Please note that this event takes place at Zita Folkets Bio, Birger Jarlsgatan 37.

About the films
Four [чотири] (2025) connects the work, biographies and artworks of four artists of Ukrainian descent – Paul Celan, Peter Hujar, Clarice Lispector, and Maya Deren. It is a film rooted in a written text, performed by its author, Moyra Davey, and spoken in translation by the filmmaker Lyuba Knorozok. The visual setting for many of the stories in Four [чотири] is New York City’s irrepressible Riverside Park, teeming with games, recreation and a global sociability on the Hudson River. In this unlikely urban refuge, a narrow green shore, Davey finds echoes of the themes she is narrating from the lives of her renown subjects – dance, music, silence, a work ethic, and hair, to name a few.

Forks & Spoons (2024) is a film that came about for an exhibition of the same name, curated by Moyra Davey at Galerie Buchholz in New York City, 2024. The film is based on Francesca Woodman and how she uses her body, gestures and objects in her photographs. Parallels are drawn from Woodman’s photographs to images from a publication by Alix Cléo Roubaux and further with contemporary artistry such as Justine Kurland and Shala Miller. By recreating and reflecting on their photographs, Davey creates a meditation on the female body, desire and artistic creation, while reflecting on her own limitations and shortcomings in the process. She writes about it herself: “My reenactments of the photographs of each artist have been mostly dutiful; predictably I only succeeded when I was able, mostly by accident, to leave them behind, decrepitude be damned”.

About the book
In the essay collection Kartotek [Index Cards], spanning from 2006 to 2019, Moyra Davey often starts from herself in her artistic process; it might be a thought which begins somewhere in everyday life – on the subway, at home or in the studio when she writes, reads or takes photographs. A personal thought that quickly connects to someone else’s, a reflection woven together with other peoples’’ thoughts such as Mary Wollstonecraft, Jean Genet, Virginia Woolf, Hollis Frampton, Chantal Akerman and Roland Barthes, among many others. In the essays we get to follow her associative connections, deeply feel how her writing takes shape and her investigation of how, what and who should be depicted, primarily in the photographic image but also in literature. The essays become a personal narrative about the necessity to create, where the narrator constantly confronts herself and critically revisits her own memories and our shared history. Kartotek is published with support from the Arts Council and the City of Malmö.

About the artist
Moyra Davey, born 1958 in Toronto, Canada and based in New York City since the 1980s, is a visual artist whose artistic work encompasses photography, film and writing. Davey has produced numerous films; her latest feature film Horse Opera (2022) had its world premiere at Toronto International Film Festival. In addition to Index Cards, she has authored several books, such as I Confess, Burn the Diaries and The Problem of Reading and has been editor of Mother Reader: Essential Writings on Motherhood. Her works has been shown in solo exhibitions at Art Institute of Chicago (2019); Portikus, Frankfurt am Main (2017); Bergen Kunsthall (2016); Mumok, Vienna (2014); Camden Arts Centre, London (2014); Kunsthalle Basel (2010) among others.

About Filmögon
Filmögon is a publisher and a magazine for moving images and cinema.