SELECTION 2015
A dialogue between new audiovisual works, older or rediscovered films and videos by artists and filmmakers who work in the expanded field of moving image practice.
The films and videos of Basma Alsharif explore the subjective experience of political landscape, investigating the links between a geographical space and its mental representation. Born in Kuwait of Palestinian origin, Alsharif’s nomadic existence – brought up in France and the United States, she has lived in Beirut, Amman and Cairo and is currently based between Los Angeles and Paris – is deeply embedded in her work, which often experiments with ideas of bi-location and the figure of the double. Unable to travel to Palestine, in Deep Sleep (2014) Alsharif uses self-hypnosis and multiple image layers as a way to be in two places at the same time and reach, if only through the medium of film, her native land. Whether working with photography, film, video, sound, text or language, the representation of Palestine as a place where the constant feeling of threat and the ever-changing geographical borders produce a sense of unreal is a crucial subject in Alsharif’s work and her on-going interrogation of the relationship between history and the human condition.
This two-part programme, co-curated with Alsharif, begins with a selection of her early videos, which are presented in dialogue with work by British filmmaker John Smith and Native American artist Sky Hopinka. In the second part, three recent works by Alsharif are accompanied, contextualised and challenged by contemporary films by American artists and filmmakers Mary Helena Clark, Claudrena Harold & Kevin Jerome Everson, Michael Robinson and Mike Stoltz.
Sky Hopinka is an enrolled member of the Ho-Chunk Nation of Wisconsin working on various projects that stem from ideas of contemporary Indigenous linguistic concepts and representational imagery. In Wawa, Hopinka hovers between a Chinuk Wawa lesson in New York and a series of interviews with and by Henry Zenk, the leading specialist of Chinuk Wawa, an American northwest coast indigenous based language adopted by European and American traders traders and settlers in the 18th and 19th centuries.
Moving from one hotel in Bethlehem to another in East Jerusalem, the filmmaker encounters a series of problems involving a ceiling, a video camera and the Israeli occupation of Palestine. Dirty Pictures is the seventh episode in the Hotel Diaries series, a collection of video recordings made in hotel rooms which relate personal experiences to contemporary world events.
Long still frames, text, language, and sound are weaved together to unfold the narrative of an anonymous group who fill their time by measuring distance. Innocent measurements transition into political ones, examining how image and sound communicate history. We Began by Measuring Distance explores an ultimate disenchantment with facts when the visual fails to communicate the tragic. (Basma Alsharif)
John Smith’s beautiful elegy for East London homes destroyed to build the M11 Link Road interweaves voices of the evicted and demolition footage to a dramatic score by Jocelyn Pook. Masterful editing introduces warning flash frames of red, green and blue to the thud of bricks, which mount to streaks of colour as figurative details of domestic life are subsumed by mechanistic force. Smith lets graffiti on the remnant homes narrate the protest, leaving us haunted by one resident’s voice: “It has a living energy of itself. That house has a spirit.” Blight reverberates now as a plangent plea to stop destroying our planet home and to design more earth-centred dialogue between architecture, infrastructure and community, beyond our speed and growth dependency. (Cherry Smith)
Home Movies Gaza introduces us to the Gaza Strip as a microcosm for the failure of civilization. In an attempt to describe the everyday of a place that struggles for the most basic of human rights, this video claims a perspective from within the domestic spaces of a territory that is complicated, derelict, and altogether impossible to separate from its political identity. (Basma Alsharif)
A film about haircuts, clothes and image/sound relationships. (John Smith)
