All programs are free to attend and include admission to view our current exhibitions Carl Cheng: Nature Never Loses and HOST: Katarina Janečková Walshe.

For accommodations, please email [email protected] in advance.

Curatorial Statement: Closed World

Closed World consists of four short-film programs, or exercises, encompassing the themes of grief, memory / remembrance, resilience, and rebuilding / recovery. Each program is designed as a ‘Closed World’ - or as a generative system formed through synthetic naturalism, where the habitable conditions of nature are replicated within spaces of the home, theater, or gallery space.

Closed World seeks to examine the earth as a whole - as a complete and interconnected system - which can be shaped into architecture as part of an integrated system derived from nature in the built environment. A closed world is built and unbuilt through the progression of the four-part exercises in this film program and the community taking part; it is not enough to talk about healing or grief, we must all go through the complete healing process as a community and ensure rebirth happens on a communal scale.

About the Organizers

Erika Mei Chua Holum is the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Associate Curator at the Blaffer Art Museum at the University of Houston and is one of three curators of the 2024 Texas Biennial. Recent projects at the Blaffer Art Museum include Makeshift Memorials, Small Revolutions with KADIST San Francisco (2024), and solo exhibitions with Cian Dayrit (2024), Saif Azzuz (2025), and Ja’Tovia Gary (2026).

Innocent Ekejiuba is a PhD student at Howard University and a Cultural Researcher. He serves as an assistant professor of Art and Cultural Management in the Creative Enterprise Leadership International Graduate Program at Pratt Institute. In 2020, he founded The Drill, a non-profit organization dedicated to building a sustainable African art ecosystem by providing early and mid-career African artists with tools for sustainable practices.

Homegrown in Austin, Future Front is an award-winning cultural space and exhibition series—with women and LGBTQ+ creatives at the front. As a 501c3 arts and culture nonprofit, we produce community-led exhibitions, markets and festivals, amplifying independent artists and creatives across disciplines in Central Texas. Welcoming 20,000+ visitors per year, our programs and partnerships invite the public to dream of a future where creativity, curiosity and intersectional design thrive in Texas, where we see ourselves and our cultures reflected in our communities.

The Texas-based filmmakers featured in Closed World have been curated by Future Front's Founding Director Jane Hervey from The Front Festival's Independent Film Showcase, which is annually hosted at The Contemporary Austin — Laguna Gloria. To learn more about The Front Festival and Future Front, head to futurefronttexas.org.

About VLM

Virginia L. Montgomery (VLM) is an award-winning experimental filmmaker and multimedia artist working across video, performance, sound design, and sculpture. She received her MFA from Yale University and her BFA from The University of Texas at Austin. VLM is known for her surreal, synthesia-esque artworks which unite elements from mysticism, science, and her own neurodivergent world. Her artworks are sensorial and symbolic. They shift in subject matter from stones to moths and machines, as VLM deploys an idiosyncratic visual vocabulary of repeating gestures and recursive symbols like circles, holes, and spheres. Her artistic efforts are characterized by material experimentation, somatic sensitivity, and her unusual studio practice of hand-raising the moths and butterflies appearing in her videos. VLM’s diverse artistic movements interrogate the complex relationship between physical and psychic structures via narratives of destruction, rebirth, and metamorphosis. VLM also holds a parallel career; she works as a visual ideation scribe, a Graphic Facilitator, a unique profession for which she travels the world to diagram the development of ideas at group meetings like TED talks, DEI events, and innovation conferences. In her work as a fine artist, VLM turns this professional skill-set, which she describes as “mind map scribing,” inwards, to render the contours of her own subconscious and its symbology.

About Bita Ghassemi

Bita Ghassemi is an award-winning Iranian-American writer and director from Austin, Texas. As a self-proclaimed Iranian-Texan, her work in the West is influenced by her travels to the East.

Her Persian short films Maryam Joon and My Friend Shokat have screened at a multitude of festivals around the world including SXSW, Austin Film Festival, the Berlinale with the Creative Mind Group, and The Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston. She was recently a semi-finalist with Disney Launchpad and co-edited the Oscar-qualifying short Things That Happen In The Bathroom.

She studied Radio-Television-Film, minored in German, and was recognized as the 2018 Outstanding Scholar of the Film Department upon graduating. She continued her studies in Beijing, China, where she earned her Master's in Global Affairs with the Schwarzman Scholarship - one of the world's most prestigious graduate fellowships.

Her Persian roots, time spent living in Berlin and Beijing, and dedication to learning about different cultures and languages influence her work.