Screening of Presence

Free and open to all! Join us for a midday screening exploring how public life has been staged, recorded, and remembered on screen. Presence is a film installation by Jingrong Zhang, supported by the Council for the Arts at MIT (CAMIT). Drawing on archival and cinematic footage across cultures and historical periods, the work assembles a "global supercut" of public gatherings: moments of solitude, chance encounters, street life, and collective assembly. As the montage builds from isolated figures to dense crowds, it invites viewers to consider how strangers come together in public space, and how those moments of shared presence have been captured on screen across a century of image-making. Every crowd on screen was once as present as we are now.