Cauleen Smith

Cauleen Smith is a filmmaker and artist living in Los Angeles. Her interdisciplinary work expands from histories and practices of experimental film, including structuralism, Third World cinema, and science fiction. Through immersive installations, moving-image works, sculpted objects, and textiles, she engages with non-Western cosmologies, Afro-diasporic histories, Black cultural icons, real and speculative utopias, and, in her words, “the everyday possibilities of the imagination.”

Her first feature film, Drylongso, garnered acclaim at the 1999 Sundance Film Festival and was restored and rereleased in 2023 by the Criterion Collection. From the mid-2000s, Smith increasingly presents in contemporary art contexts, where short films and videos, sequential screens, and expanded installations enwrap visitors in her world-building projects.

Cauleen Smith – Lessons in Semaphore (2015)

• Fobrux

In this 16 mm silent film by Cauleen Smith, shot on the South Side of Chicago, choreographer Taisha Paggett dances with two flags in an attempt to communicate in semaphore, a visual language. She meets a young boy, Malik, who appears to speak her language.

16mm screened as digital video, color, silent, 4 min.