Adam Piron
Adam Piron (Kiowa Tribe of Oklahoma and Mohawk) is a Southern California-based filmmaker, writer, and curator. He is a co-founder of COUSIN: a film collective dedicated to supporting Indigenous artists experimenting with, and pushing the boundaries, of the moving image. His films have screened at the New York Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, MoMA Doc Fortnight, The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA, and various other festivals and programs.
One of Eadweard Muybridge’s earliest contributions to the photographic image were stereographs commissioned by the U.S. Army, capturing their war against the Modoc Tribe in Northern California. These stereographs, many of which were staged, are revisited here through violent collisions of image and sound – generating entangled histories of visual technology, genocide and expropriation of Indigenous populations.
A relative’s likeness surfaces as a tattoo on the arm of a Ukrainian soldier and an army base in Oklahoma, built to fight Kiowa and Apache, is rededicated to aid in the fight against Putin’s Western expansion. Adam Piron explores the contradictions of colonialism and anti-settler solidarity across time, geography and the muddled spaces of TikTok, where representations of Indigenous peoples are caught up in the chaotic circulation of images.