Opening of Beside Itself, February 24, 5–10pm, as part of Away From Desk

JOAN presents a film program as part of Away From Desk at Wilshire Online (6135 Wilshire Blvd, Los Angeles), a temporary exhibition space on view February 24–March 15. The project brings together programming by Five Churches, The Fulcrum, Gene’s Dispensary, Leroy’s, and O-Town House, with additional contributions by Poetic Research Bureau and others. Music and performances will unfold throughout the evening.

For this presentation, JOAN will take over the intimate 20-seat cinema to to bring together an extended program on loop throughout the run. We’ve invited two artists whose work we’ve been thinking about for some time—please join us there and say hello.

Beside Itself: Constantinos Hadzinikolaou & Stanya Kahn

JOAN presents a looping film program featuring works by Constantinos Hadzinikolaou and Stanya Kahn.

Bringing together two distinct yet resonant practices, this program by LA– and Athens-based artists considers the diaristic as a political form—where confession slips into critique and language becomes a site of friction. In these works, text operates as a parallel image: subtitles drift from speech, translation fractures meaning, and words move alongside the visual field, generating friction rather than definition.

Working through slowness, repetition, and delay, the artists engage duration as a subtle form of holding ground. Fragments, residues, and eroded gestures replace narrative climax. Memory appears as sediment; voice becomes unstable; the image refuses to resolve. What remains is trace: an afterimage shaped as much by what is withheld as by what is shown.

Constantinos Hadzinikolaou is an Athens-based artist working across film, video, performance, and text. His diaristic works weave together fragments of speech, subtitles, and citation, treating language as material that drifts alongside the image rather than explaining it. Through slowness and repetition, his films resist narrative closure, unfolding as layered reflections on memory, translation, and the unstable space between private voice and public address.

He has presented work in a two-person exhibition at Tavros (Athens), as well as in screenings and programs at international festivals and independent art spaces across Europe and the United States. His works Anestis (2017) and Woyzeck (2017) were presented at documenta 14.

Stanya Kahn is a Los Angeles–based interdisciplinary artist working in film/video, drawing, painting, sculpture/installation, sound, and writing. Dialectics, the uncanny, pathos, and humor are central to a practice dedicated to crossroads and undersides—of power and the unseen, absurdity and distress, fiction and document, language and the body, relations between the state and the commons, and narrative time and the synchronic time of impulse.

Recent solo exhibitions include Gattopardo (Los Angeles), the Wexner Center for the Arts, MoMA PS1, the New Museum (New York), the Institute of Contemporary Art (Los Angeles), the British Film Institute / London Film Festival, Vielmetter Los Angeles, Marlborough Chelsea (New York), and Cornerhouse (Manchester, UK). Select group exhibitions include the 2025 California Biennial at the Orange County Museum of Art, the Yokohama Triennial, the Julia Stoschek Foundation, the Wesleyan University Art Gallery, the 2018 Gwangju Biennale, the Hammer Museum, the Astrup Fearnley Museet (Norway), among others.