Much Madness is one of thirteen episodes in the Hang on a Minute series, a set of 1-minute films that reflect on the traditional patterns of oppression in women’s lives (pornography, violence, nuclear weapons) and the many forms that resistance takes. Commissioned by UK television broadcaster Channel 4, the series was intended to interrupt standard television programming with ‘moments of disturbance.’

The artist strikes emotive poses frame by frame against a black background, wearing shifting headdresses that reveal multiple roles. Her white bust streams horizontally and vertically as stop-motion gestures of ecstasy and agony erupt, accompanied by the unnerving repetition of the sound of a camera shutter.

Thoquenne’s performance is interwoven with history through text and archival facsimiles. A decorative hand mirror gradually overexposes to reveal a ghostly title frame: ‘Hysteria’. A red placard flashes: ‘France, 1878’, and text overlays an archival photograph: ‘Augustine’. The film draws from Georges Didi-Huberman’s Invention of Hysteria: Charcot and the Photographic Iconography of the Salpêtrière (1982). It traces the case of Louise Augustine Gleizes — known as Augustine or ‘A’ — whose body and behaviour were relentlessly documented at the Salpêtrière hospital as evidence of hysteria. Hospital beds, tribunals of men, and the camera itself reveal a system that observed, classified, and publicly displayed women’s bodies. Through fragmentation and repetition, Hysteria confronts the violence of the medical gaze and reclaims performance as an act of feminist refusal.

Using her own mature, naked body as a site for experimentation, Vicky Smith captures herself falling into herself, time and again. A ghostly white, layered, still or trembling horizontal body is animated on hand-processed black-and-white film. Working with orthochromatic film stock — a naturally blue-sensitive film which emphasises the skin’s surface details (veins, freckles, blemishes and fine lines) — she adds texture to her body sculpture: a mass of limbs, torsos, hands, feet, and heads. As multiple superimpositions accrue, the body fragments and reappears, forming a ‘corps morcelé’ that resists coherence. In her silent, evocative meditation on the human body, gravity, falling and fragmentation, she also laces the film with humour: a crazed eye appears out of the darkness, and a cold sensation surges through us as a set of teeth are clenched and chattering. By doing so, she adds lightness or repair to resignation. She enjoys her own body, and that autonomy is mesmerising.

Set in a desolate cathedral, Catholic Guilt juxtaposes imagery and acts of subversion, self-expression, and body repression with images of paraphernalia of Catholic female saints — religious iconography associated with sacrifice, devotion, mysticism, purity, and submission. Through performative sequences and associative images, the film reveals the ways in which religious ideology inscribes itself on women’s bodies. It evokes how guilt is embodied, ritualised, and persists as a physical and psychological condition. The sinister, carnivalesque, hypnotic soundtrack by Coil intensifies the film’s atmosphere of trance and unease, reinforcing a sense of cyclical constraint over transcendence.

Rather than illustrating myth, Durga draws on the Hindu goddess’s generative and destructive force, understanding creation as cyclical, unstable, and continually in motion. Across recurring images, it evokes cycles of fertility, loss, and regeneration, while meaning coalesces through association, duration, and return. Shadows appear. Images overlap. Until the film’s black becomes white — exposed.

Made while Syed was an undergraduate student at the University of East London, the film emerged from her exploration of 16mm printing techniques. She paced it according to the time it takes for the image to “fade from saturated black to a ghostly white, where memory lingers more strongly than representation.”

In Aberrant Motion #1, Cathy Sisler makes her first appearance as the Spinning Woman, who explores movement as a strategy to destabilise normalcy. This low-resolution analogue video is the first of 4 performance-based videos (created between 1993 and 1994) in which she plays with the notion of the ‘aberrant’: deviation from expected patterns or non-conformity to usual standards.

In Self-portrait #1: Shedding, Vicky Smith appears in multiple superimposed layers on hand-processed black-and-white film. Framed as a white bust against a black background, her features are unsharp, surrounded by a pulsating echo of her silhouette — hovering around her and passing through her. As she rotates her head from side to side, accelerating and decelerating, her face is captured at every angle and her hair lifts and trails through the air, multiplying across exposures. Working with the Bolex camera, Smith uses superimposition and shifts in speed to build and then erode the image. Her bust suddenly falls backwards, slipping into focus and away from its layered doubles. It leaves behind a residual, spectral trace, as if the body sheds its own image, layer by layer. What remains is not disappearance, but clarity: a self arriving through subtraction, shaped by motion, gravity, and the mechanics of the camera.

a woman washes her hair in the kitchen sink while telling
her friend about a memory of sitting in a bathtub and
watching her aunt get ready to go out. 

a narrative fragment,

a very short story, a performance and exercise in the prosaic as mythologized
through memory. 

concision and the infinite that is always entwined with
remembering and forgetting. 

the pressing of pubic hair against nylon

the pressing of fingers on fruit

the pressing of an image of 

womanhood 

sexuality 

pleasure on the young psyche of the character in the film.

the pressing of light on photosensitive chemicals. 

minerals i’ve exposed. 

light struck is a phrase i like to think about. the bearable 
violence. 

— Stephanie Barber