A still from the film An All-Around Feel Good by Jordan Lord. Prominent black borders are on the left, right and bottom edges of the image.  Framed by the black borders is an image of the Colorado State Fair, taken from the bleachers on a bright sunny day. The camera is facing outside the main stage, where there are horses and riders in a pen, numerous parked cars and a tractor, and several U.S. flags, and audience members both near the camera and across the stage. On the bottom is the caption “Belonging to the nation-state is not premised on seeing or attending.”

Now extended through March 8: Online access to works in the exhibition
Online and in-person: Friday, February February 23:
5:30 pm ET: Screening of How Is It That You Frame Old Glory in Your Mouth?
7 pm ET, online and in-person: Conversation with Jordan Lord, Abby Sun, and Pooja Rangan.
ASL interpretation and CART provided, catering from Alibaba Kebab for in-person attendees.
Free or suggested donation; get tickets below

Celebrating the closing of Jordan Lord’s solo exhibition The Voice of Democracy, Squeaky Wheel invites audiences from Buffalo and beyond to watch the works in the exhibition online, and join us for a screening and conversation between the artist, Abby Sun, and Pooja Rangan. The works in the exhibition analyze the politics of voice and accent across disability, race, class, and gender, and how they shape the terms of entry to democracy.

Attendees will have the opportunity to experience the four works by the artist included in the exhibition anytime between February 19 through February 23.

• How Is It That You Frame Old Glory in Your Mouth? (digital video, 74 minutes, sound, open captions, audio description, 2023)
• An All-Around Feel Good (digital video, 25 minutes, sound, open captions, audio description, 2024)
• I didn’t set out to make a film about religion (digital video, 30 minutes, sound, open captions, audio description, 2024)
• Documentary Participation Agreement (PDF contract template, 2023)

On Friday, February 23, online and in-person attendees are invited to a dedicated screening of How Do You Frame Old Glory in Your Mouth? at 5:30 pm ET and a conversation about the exhibition with Lord, Rangan, and Sun at 7 pm ET. Catering with vegetarian options will be provided for in-person attendees; ASL interpretation and CART will be provided for all.

Learn more about the exhibition here.

Biographies of the artist and participants

Jordan Lord (US) is a filmmaker, writer, and artist whose work addresses the relationships between historical and emotional debts, framing and support, access, and documentary. Their films have been shown at festivals and venues including MoMA Doc Fortnight, Dokufest Kosovo, Union Docs, and the Berwick Film and Media Arts Festival. Their film Shared Resources (2021) won the John Marshall Award for Contemporary Ethnographic Media at the Camden International Film Festival and the Critics Jury Prize at the Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival. They have presented solo exhibitions at Piper Keys and Artists Space. In 2021, they were profiled as one of the 25 New Faces of Independent Film by Filmmaker Magazine, and their work has been featured in publications such as Screen Slate, Millennium Film Journal, and Hyperallergic.

Abby Sun (she/her) is IDA’s Director of Artist Programs and Editor of Documentary magazine. Before joining IDA, Abby was the Curator of the DocYard and co-curated My Sight is Lined with Visions: 1990s Asian American Film & Video with Keisha Knight. As a graduate student researcher in the MIT Open Documentary Lab, Abby edited Immerse. She has bylines in Film Comment, Filmmaker, Film Quarterly, Notebook, Sight & Sound, and other publications. Abby has served on festival juries for Hot Docs, Dokufest, Palm Springs, New Orleans, and CAAMfest, as well as nominating committees for the Gotham Awards and Cinema Eye. She has reviewed projects for IDFA Forum, BGDM, NEA, SFFILM, LEF Foundation, Princess Grace Foundation, the Boston Foundation, Sundance Catalyst, and spoken on and facilitated panels at Locarno, IFFR, TIFF, NYFF, EFM, and other film festivals. Along with Keisha, Abby received a fall 2022 Warhol Foundation Curatorial Research Fellowship. She produced Shared Resources and, with Jordan Lord, received a 2022 American Stories Documentary Fellowship for the upcoming The Voice of Democracy. Her hometown is Columbia, Missouri, US.

Pooja Rangan is Associate Professor of English and Chair of Film and Media Studies at Amherst College. Her research explores the humanitarian preoccupations of documentary media, with an emphasis on the ethics of voice and listening. Rangan is author of Immediations: The Humanitarian Impulse in Documentary (Duke University Press, 2017) and co-editor of Thinking with an Accent: Toward a New Object, Method, and Practice (University of California Press, 2023). Her forthcoming book The Documentary Audit (from Columbia University Press), explores the politics of listening in documentary, asking how accented, disabled, and abolitionist practitioners trouble established documentary values of justice and accountability. Rangan co-edits the Investigating Visible Evidence book series at Columbia University Press and serves on the editorial board of the journal World Records; she also served as Board President of the documentary arts showcase, The Flaherty.

This project was made possible through support from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and Humanities New York with support from the National Endowment for the Humanities.