Shelly Silver

Shelly Silver's work in film, video, and photography spans an eclectic range of subject matter and genres, exploring the personal and societal relations that identify and restrict us; the indirect routes of pleasure and desire; the stories that we dream or fabricate about others, and the stories that we construct about ourselves. Silver's art has been exhibited and broadcast widely throughout the U.S., Europe and Asia. Screenings and installations have been mounted by venues such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the International Center of Photography in New York, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the Yokohama Museum, the Pompidou Center, the Kyoto Museum, the London Institute of Contemporary Arts, the Museo Reina Sofia, and the London, Singapore, New York, Moscow, and Berlin film festivals.

Her work has been broadcast on BBC/England, PBS/USA, Arte, Planete/Europe, RTE/Ireland, SWR/Germany, and Atenor/Spain. Silver's numerous fellowships and grants include awards from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the NEA, NYSCA, NYFA, the DAAD, the Jerome Foundation, the Japan Foundation and Anonymous was a Woman.

2020
Girls | Museum
71 min
Girls | Museum is a voyage through the historical art collection of the Museum der bildenden Künste Leipzig/MdbK, guided by the expertise and insights of a group of girls, ages 7 to 19. Moving from painting to painting, century to century, they tell us what they see.

2019
a tiny place that is hard to touch
触れがたき小さな場所
39 min
In a faceless apartment in Tatekawa, Tokyo, an American woman hires a Japanese woman to translate interviews about Japan’s declining birthrate. The two women grate, fight, and then crash together in love or lust, at which point their story gets hijacked into science fiction territory, as the translator interrupts their work sessions with stories from a world infected with the knowledge of its own demise.

2017
Frog Spider Hand Horse House
50 min
In Shelly Silver’s “frog spider hand horse house,” the effort of all things to keep existing has been observed by someone with a camera who seems, as far as personality goes, to be no one. This acutely neutral watcher—curious and patient, pushing very close and holding steady there registers the super-focused effort of all creatures toward the expression of vitality, the stubborn going-on in time of particularly shaped and textured bodies.

A Strange New Beauty
51 min
A disturbing intrusion into the luxurious homes of Silicon Valley. Using an aggressive soundtrack and a full frame often fractured into small rectangles covered by text, Silver reveals a deafening violence behind the glittering beauty and deceptively calm of this suburban landscape. There is no human presence, but the homes seem to contain a memory of disturbing events, to bear the traces of a savagery just offscreen. Charlotte Selb

2013
TOUCH
68 min
A man returns, after fifty years, to Chinatown to care for his dying mother. He is a librarian, a re-cataloguer, a gay man, a watcher, an impersonator. He passes his time collecting images that he puts before us, his witnesses and collaborators. Sitting in the dark, we share his cloak of invisibility, both a benefit and a curse.

2009
5 Lessons and 9 Questions about Chinatown / You live somewhere, walk down the same street 50, 100, 10,000 times, each time taking in fragments, but never fully registering THE PLACE. Years, decades go by and you continue, unseeing, possibly unseen....

2008
In Complete World / In complete world, stimulates attention through words and faces, focusing on varieties of personal states of mind while linking them in different ways to the broader complexity that is the United States....

2008
Exceptional Happenings / A three-channel video installation commissioned by The Corporation of Yaddo for their exhibition Yaddo: Making American Culture at The New York Public Library curated by Micki McGee....