Jenny Perlin’s films, artworks, and essays engage documentary traditions, incorporating innovative stylistic techniques to engage issues around truth, misunderstanding, and personal history. Her projects look closely at ways in which social machinations are reflected in the fragments of everyday life.

Perlin is adjunct faculty at Eugene Lang College and a fellow in Artistic Research at the National Academy of Art in Oslo, Norway. Her work has been shown in numerous exhibitions and film festivals, including at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Guggenheim Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, the New York Film Festival, the Berlin Film Festival, Rotterdam Film Festival, and others. In addition to her work as an artist, she is director of The Hoosac Institute, a  platform for text and image focusing on works that exceed or challenge conventional disciplinary narratives. 

During her time at GIDEST, Jenny will work on “Near Space,” where she explores a poetics of the stratosphere. Through this investigation, she draws connections between historical imaginaries and contemporary scientific ideas. What is above the Earth’s atmosphere? Who claims this space and why? And what might the stratosphere be saying back?

Comprised of a film and a series of written essays, the project focuses on literary and historical attempts to escape the surface of the earth in balloons, together with contemporary attempts to decode the stratosphere. This exploration connects not only with ideas around escape, mapping, and surveillance but also with the catastrophic realities of climate change.

Jenny Perlin works through story, conversation, and correspondence, using 16mm film, video, photography, and nonfiction writing. She engages those tools as needed, finding a methodological balance based on movement within the project.    

She is compelled by misapprehension, exploring how materials cannot hold the excess of their experience; how words and images fill to bursting and explode, letting shards and fragments fall. Her creative practices collect these, not with an eye to restoring or comparing but to hold them as they are, in all their incomplete, imaginative pieces.