Join us for a live-streaming of Nina Sarnelle’s 45-min video essay Nike X and my Dead Hand. The one-time screening will be followed by a Q&A moderated by Ana Iwataki!  

Nike X and My Dead Hand is a (forever?) unfinished research project in Air Force Blue - the color of the sky on a clear day. Conflating a history of basketball celebrity and sneaker design with the Cold War-era Nike Missile Defense system, the project began with performative installations at Angel's Gate/Fort MacArthur in San Pedro, CA. This site is a former Nike Headquarters charged with protecting the Los Angeles Defense Area from aerial attack, where today a basketball court in the clouds has become an iconic site for filming fantasies of flight, indestructibility and arch support. A couple yards away from the court, the "Korean Bell of Friendship" seems to hang in tension. It's gift from the South Korean government -- a monument to a war that never ended. Shot on location and installed again at Angel's Gate Park for visitors to experience in situ, Sarnelle's video work traces reverberations of the apocalyptic militarism of the 1950's to present-day tensions on the Korean peninsula. Nike is the Greek goddess of victory: a metaphor useful to branding both sporting goods and national security. As the project spirals outwards, it attempts to destabilize free market ideology by excavating a shared language of sports, capitalism and war.