BROOKLYN, NY.- Smack Mellon and the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School announced A Non-Coincidental Mirror, an exhibition by 2022–2024 VLC Fellow Carmen Amengual. A Non- Coincidental Mirror is a film installation by the Los Angeles-based Argentine artist and her first solo institutional exhibition in the US.

The exhibition results from ongoing research that Amengual started in 2022 about a little explored event in the cultural history of Global South solidarities: the First Third World Filmmakers Meeting in Algiers in 1973 and its second iteration in Buenos Aires in 1974. The events served as hubs where self-identified “third-world” filmmakers discussed the role of filmmaking in anti-colonial struggles, made agreements, and strategized about how to produce and distribute films under dire political conditions.

Based on an archive Amengual inherited from her mother—who collaborated with the organizers of the meeting in Algiers—the artist embarked on a field investigation that took her to Algiers, Buenos Aires, and Rome to follow the thread of this forgotten event and film in these locations as she looked to reimagine a failed documentary project that the organizers, together with the artist’s mother, attempted to make as part of the follow up meeting in Argentina.

The exhibition consists of a film installation that creates a kaleidoscopic reconstruction of this experi- ence. Using architecture as an entry point to the utopian horizons of the past, and to the ruinification of these in the present, the multichannel film installation intertwines three storylines: an inquiry on politi- cal cinema and its methodologies, as they manifested in the Filmmakers’ Meetings; a question about the role of architecture and the decolonial project—reflecting on some of the architectural projects in Algiers and the student-led efforts to decolonize architecture education at the University of Buenos Aires; and a question about the present, as it emerges from the filmic portraits of buildings and urban infrastructure that the artist conducted during her research trips.

As part of the film installation, Amengual designed a series of functional, sculptural objects and exhibi- tion display structures that further underscore the cross continental entanglement of localized, anti- Imperialist pedagogy and cultural expression. They offer a space for attentive viewership, communal reflection, and study while showcasing the artist’s ongoing project research, documents, facsimiles, and other printed material.

Told in the present, A Non-Coincidental Mirror speaks of Global South solidarities and reclaims for the current moment a concrete experience of transnational, self organized collaboration while foreground- ing the social and historical conditions that made it possible.

The exhibition is accompanied by a publication featuring an essay by curators Eriola Pira and Rachel Vera Steinberg, a conversation between the artist and independent curator and writer Natasha Marie Llorens, and an essay by film historian Mariano Mestman. Designed by Jacob Lindgren, the publication features extensive images from the research and film installation.

Carmen Amengual is an interdisciplinary artist, independent researcher, and filmmaker from Argentina, now based in Los Angeles. Her work explores the emergence of collective imaginaries, identity formations, and conceptions of time and history that shape political imagination. She has presented her projects in various formats both nationally and internationally, with exhibitions at Artist Space (New York), Human Resources and 2220 Art & Archives (Los Angeles), Table (Chicago), Biquini Wax EPS (Mexico City), and Museo Centenario (Buenos Aires). Her work has also been featured in conferences such as Film Undone: Elements for a Latent Cinema (Silent Green / Kino Arsenal, Berlin) and Film Act: Third Cinema and Its Legacies (American University in Cairo), and in screenings across the US and abroad.

A Non-Coincidental Mirror is her first solo institutional exhibition in the US. Amengual graduated in Comparative Litera- ture from the University of Buenos Aires and holds an MFA in Visual Arts from the California Institute of the Arts. She is a 2021–2022 Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Studio Program fellow, a 2022 2024 Vera List Center for Art and Politics Fellow, a 2023 and 2024 Graham Foundation grantee, and a 2024 Creative Capital awardee.