A latino white woman with chin-bone long brown hair, wearing a black button up shirt, sitting on a stool and looking at the camera.

Carmen Amengual

Los Angeles, California

Carmen Amengual received the Creative Capital Award in 2024. Carmen Amengual is an interdisciplinary artist from Argentina based in Los Angeles. Through engagement with research, archives, literature, myths, and oral histories, her work examines the interstice between memory, biography and history. Her projects encompass research, film, sculpture, painting, sound, text, and installation strategies to explore the emergence of collective imaginaries, identity formations, and conceptions of time and history that condition the political imagination. Her works examine the way historical experience is transmitted intergenerationally, rearticulating (hi)stories of individual and collective resistance, and excavating their emancipatory potential. She has exhibited at Artists Space, New York; Table, Chicago; Human Resources, Echo Park Film Center, and E.D. Freeman Gallery, Los Angeles; Biquini Wax, Mexico City; and Museo Trabucco, Buenos Aires. She was Assistant Curator at the Gallery at REDCAT in Los Angeles, and Research Fellow and Assistant Curator for the Getty PST: LA/LA project The Words of Others: León Ferrari and Rhetoric in Times of War. Amengual was a Whitney Museum’s Independent Study Program 2021-22 Studio Fellow, and is a recipient of the 2022-24 Vera List Center for Arts and Politics artist fellowship. She graduated in Comparative Literature at the University of Buenos Aires, and holds an MFA from CalArts.

A Non Coincidental Mirror


Carmen Amengual is an interdisciplinary artist and experimental filmmaker from Argentina based in Los Angeles.

Artist Bio

Hybridizing the traditions of experimental and political filmmaking, this project creates a memory of a forgotten event in the history of the Global South: the first Third World Filmmakers Meeting (Algiers, 1973) and its second iteration (Buenos Aires, 1974). The event served as a hub where “third-world” filmmakers discussed the role of filmmaking in anti-colonial struggles, made agreements, and strategized about how to produce films under dire political conditions. Based on an archive inherited from the artist’s mother —who collaborated with the organizers of the Meeting in the making of a film about the anti-colonial struggles in Africa for a Latin American audience— A Non Coincidental Mirror explores the networks of solidarity threaded throughout this story, and the historical forces that determined its outcome. Through historical research, compilation of oral accounts, and a critical examination of Third Cinema films and manifestos, A Non Coincidental Mirror recontextualizes this event and reimagines the 1974 documentary project that did not come to fruition. It experiments with storytelling, documentary forms, expanded cinema, and installation strategies to create a film installation that reconsiders the relationships that these cultural agents sought to weave, based on the trust that through cinema oppressed peoples could not only recognize each other, but work together towards their emancipation. The final output will be an experimental documentary film installation conceived to be shown in an exhibition space that will house associated discursive programming, projections, and a small publication. A feature length format will be developed simultaneously to amplify the project’s access and circulation.


Award Year
2024
Status

In Progress