MOCA Artist Film Series is presented by The Edward F. Limato Foundation.
Danielle Dean
Hemel, 2024
16 mm transferred to digital video, sound
29 min, 44 sec
Danielle Dean will be present for a post-screening conversation with Cauleen Smith.
Danielle Dean’s film is a portrait of Hemel Hempstead, England, where she was raised, and unfolds as a personal essay on the town’s history as a planned community under the New Towns Act of 1946. Titled Hemel, the work’s central reference is a 1957 sci-fi horror B-movie shot in town about the arrival of a non-human entity that infiltrates the minds of residents and endangers life with a toxic black slime. Playing a composite character based on herself and the movie’s detective protagonist, Dean brings together real and imagined worlds, both past and present. Hemel blurs fiction and documentary to expand a critical reading of the colonial overtones in the original movie, while recasting its visual language to consider the race, class, and labour dynamics of a small English town in the post-Brexit context.
This screening represents the West Coast premiere of Hemel.
Working with archives, social practice, performance, video, drawing, and sculpture, Danielle Dean investigates the recursive loops between the circulation of ideas, the history of colonialism, and the material reproduction of global capitalism. Operating across media and with a variety of collaborators and participants, she tries to find fault lines of failure and futurity within this seemingly closed circuit. Born in Alabama to a Nigerian father and an English mother and raised in London, she draws on this multinational background to examine how advertising, film, architecture, media, and corporate culture influence bodies, desires, politics, and everyday life. Dean received her MFA from California Institute of the Arts, is an alumna of the Whitney Independent Study Program, and is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Visual Arts at UC San Diego. Recent solo exhibitions include shows at Spike Island, UK (2025), Mercer Union, Toronto (2024), Times Square Arts, NY (2023), ICA San Diego, CA (2023), Tate Britain, London (2022), and Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, MI (2018). Other public presentations include Performa 21 (2021) and The Whitney Biennial (2022). Group exhibitions include shows at the Contemporary Austin (2023), the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam(2018), Lafayette Anticipation, Paris (2018), and the Made in L.A. Biennial at The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2014). Her work is held in prestigious collections around the world, such as the Whitney Museum, the Hammer Museum, Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and the Arts Council collection, London, to name a few.
Cauleen Smith is a Los Angeles-based artist who makes films, installations, and objects that reflect upon the everyday possibilities of the imagination.
MOCA Artist Film Series is organized by Anna Katz, Senior Curator with Michele Huizar, Production Coordinator, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.
Visit here for a complete listing of the 2026 series.
