Calla Henkel and Max Pitegoff
Paradise and THEATER
May 15 & 16, 2026
Artist Conversation with Sophie Cavoulacos: May 15th, 6pm
Opening Reception: May 15th, 7pm-9pm
Screenings:
Friday, May 15th Paradise (1:20 minutes) 12pm, 1:30pm, 3pm & 4:30pm
Saturday, May 16th THEATER (65 minutes) 12pm, 1:15pm, 2:30pm, 3:45pm & 5pm
times is pleased to present Calla Henkel and Max Pitegoff’s episodic films Paradise (2020-2022) and THEATER (2023-2025), shown together for the first time in new york city. Henkel and Pitegoff’s film practice weaves together the lived reality of the spaces they run with fictional narratives, living somewhere between photography, theater, documentation, and long-form poetry. Shot on 16mm film, both films are narrated by subtitled text and scored by musician MK Velsorf.
On May 15th, please join the artists in conversation with Sophie Cavoulacos, Associate Curator in the Department of Film at The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
The 4-part film Paradise takes place in a fictional eponymous bar and follows a group of bartenders as they navigate a chronically absent boss that wants the bar to function as a newsroom. Paradise focuses on labor, performance, and how much one has to give away while working. The bartenders are all forced to read text from a teleprompter to the customers, complying with the out-of-touch boss’s desire to spread his own language. As the texts become unhinged, the bartenders decide to take control, but their own desires are muddy. It isn't until the bar gets shut down that a nuanced collectivity is formed. The actors in Paradise are a mix of TV Bar employees, friends, and people who drifted into the bar’s orbit, and the narrative was finished upon TV Bar’s closure at the end of 2022.
The 5-part film THEATER is set and shot at New Theater Hollywood in Los Angeles, the theater space the two artists have been operating since January 2024. Blending fiction with documentation, THEATER uses footage shot during rehearsals of productions staged at New Theater Hollywood to construct a narrative around a character named Kennedy, played by filmmaker Leilah Weinraub, who buys a fifty-seat theater after a car accident and subsequent cash settlement. Soon after, Kennedy moves into the theater and attempts to build an ensemble. In her desire for community, she faces the cult-like power it takes to keep a group together, and the unyielding hope of transformation through fame– all haunted by strikes, ghosts, exploitation, love, and the maddening reality of living inside of other people’s ambitions.
Calla Henkel and Max Pitegoff’s practice is embedded in founding and running venues as sites for social and collaborative work, taking form through filmmaking, photography, theater, sculpture and writing. They currently operate New Theater Hollywood, a black box in Los Angeles that produces experimental theatrical productions with artists, musicians, filmmakers, writers and performers. Previously, in Berlin, they ran TV Bar, New Theater, and Times Bar. Their expanded documentation of these spaces trace the economic, political, and personal rules or conditions under which shared space can exist.
Henkel and Pitegoff's work has been shown at REDCAT, The Hammer Museum, the Van Abbemuseum, Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi, Fluentum, and MAMCO Geneva, among others.