An experimental documentary maker for over 25 years, Even has produced work which ranges from feature-length documentaries to multichannel, immersive and interactive video installations. Her projects, which rely on almost imperceptible digital manipulation of slow and extended moments, depict the less overt manifestations of complex, and at times extreme, social and political dynamics in locations such as Palestine, Turkey, the U.S. and Germany.
Even’s video-work has been shown at the Museum of Modern Art (NY), the Whitney Biennial, the Johannesburg Biennial, as well as in many galleries, museums and festivals in the U.S., Canada and Europe, including the Museum of Modern Art’s Doc Fortnight (NY), RIDM Festival (Montreal), and Rotterdam Film Festival. Her work has won numerous grants and awards including Artadia Awards (Chicago), Jerome Foundation’s Media Arts Award, 3ARTs Visual Arts and Next Level Awards, Efroymson Contemporary Arts Fellowship, Illinois Arts Council Artist Fellowship, and multiple NYSCA and DCASE Individual Artist Grants; and has been acquired for the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art (NY), the Jewish Museum (NY) and Harvard University’s Carpenter Center, among others.
A professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago’s Film, Video, New Media, and Animation department, Even has been a featured speaker at programs such as MIT Doc Lab, the Whitney Museum Seminar series, SXSW Interactive Conference, the Digital Flaherty Seminar, ACM Multimedia and many more.
Even’s work is distributed by Heure Exquise (France), Video Data Bank (U.S.), and Groupe Intervention Video (Canada).
“Relying on subtle disruptions of images and sound, and on almost imperceptible digital manipulation of slow and extended moments, my work aims to elicit those signs of underlying human life that might otherwise remain latent or oppressed but which disorient and interrupt any innocent view of the everyday.
Negotiating the sometimes intense opposition between conflicting truths, bringing to the fore the multiplicity and transience of point(s)-of-view, is an underlying formal as well as ethical and political concern in my documentary projects, which hence straddle the fields of video art and experimental documentary.
My goal is to create work that has the depth of a feature-length film and yet is fragmented, inconclusive and non-linear, and is both spatial and temporal; hand the viewer the power (and responsibility) to patch a temporary whole from the vignettes I assemble; depict the idiosyncrasy/singularity of individuals at the heart of a category that nonetheless defines them; expose the unique force and beauty, both internal and external, of my characters’ worlds; express the imprint of my ‘I’ on what I see, without speaking through it; produce visual music that depends on slow moments, and enables emotional nuance and depth; use digital effects that enhance the real and make it internal, imagined, remembered, felt.”
