Yervant Gianikianand Angela Ricci Lucchireturn to MoMA, nearly a decade after their 2009 retrospective, with this poignant portrait completed by Gianikian following the death of Ricci Lucchi, his lifelong partner and collaborator, earlier this year. The intricate, affective montage, structured around readings of Ricci Lucchi’s illustrated diaries, embodies the tenets of the pair’s political cinema. Since the 1970s, Gianikian and Ricci Lucchi’s vivid manipulation of archival images of war and repression in the 20th century ran parallel with an urgency to infuse bygone images with immediacy—to treat them as “object[s] of the present.” A sustained meditation on memory and the passage of time, the film opens up a life in images—travelogues in Turkey, Armenia, and Russia; quietly touching domestic moments; and footage of the pair surrounded by their work in recent exhibitions—to new meanings. Simultaneously a private gesture, a living catalog, and a grand filmic document, Angela's Diariesevokes Gianikian and Ricci Lucchi through both their radical artistic vision and a shared love of life.

Organized by Sophie Cavoulacos, Assistant Curator, Department of Film