Projects in categories: Artist Project and Video / Experimental

Synopsis

INFINITY MINUS INFINITY draws on several inspirations: the modernist verse of the Jamaican poet Una Marson, the alluvial invocations of the Martiniquan philosopher and poet Edouard Glissant, the black feminist poetics of the Brazilian philosopher Denise Ferreira da Silva and the racial formation of geology theorised by British geographer Kathryn Yusoff to dramatise an audio-visual experiment in choreo-poetics.
INFINITY MINUS INFINITY brings together dance, music, recital and digital animation to compose a transhistorical zone in which the unpayable debts of racial capitalism cannot be separated from the ongoing crimes of capitalogenic climate catastrophe. Infinity minus Infinity enacts the durational timelines of past distress, present duress and future dread through the assembly of a chorus of trans-temporal deities whose utterances, expressions, gestures and movements personify the compounded, accumulated, irreparable times and spaces of the hostile environment.
The phrase ‘hostile environment’ invokes the covert policy of targeting migrants enacted by the Conservative government since 2014. It stands for the criminalisation of the Afro-Caribbean women and men that migrated to Britain in the 1950s to help reconstruct its industrial infrastructure. The effort to detain and deport these women and men of the Windrush generation – so called because they followed in the wake of the men that emigrated to Britain from the Caribbean on board the SS Empire Windrush in 1948 – reveals the British state’s commitment to disarticulating the forms of attachment and belonging of Afro-Caribbean settlement that helped decolonize the British empire from within.
Infinity minus Infinity extends the policy of the ongoing hostile environment backward and forward in an inter-scalar movement between times and spaces that dramatises Saidiya V. Hartman’s formulation of the afterlife of slavery within a choreography of what Christina Sharpe calls anti-blackness as total climate. (RCA)
Official Selection Berlin International Film Festival 2020 - Forum Expanded - International premiere

Synopsis

Forensic Architecture meticulously reconstruct an accident involving a boat full of migrants close to the European coast. The work is based on video material recorded by artist and survivor Amel Alzakout as the boat was sinking.
Official Selection Berlin International Film Festival 2020 - Forum Expanded - World premiere

Synopsis

The Outer Hebrides was long ago once thought of as a place of seers, who were known to have the gift of Second Sight: an ability to foretell future events. These prognostications were revealed to the seer in the form of visions or otherworldly sounds. Sometimes they took the form of portents derived by augury read from animals, bones, or weather patterns foretelling what has yet come to pass.
Using these stories as a starting point, THE TWO SIGHTS, is a portrait of a rapidly changing maritime environment with its acoustic ecology and culture in flux in a time of uncertain futures.
Long take Super 16mm cinematography, interwoven with site-specific field recordings and interviews collected from the disappearing oral histories of several Hebridean communities are collaged to explore the relationship between place narrative, environment, and the reciprocal influences they exact upon one another.
Official Selection Berlin International Film Festival 2020 - Forum - World premiere

Synopsis

The title is borrowed from a recent book which discusses the effect of the use of the internet on peoples emotions i.e. body image, general existential issues etc . I consider the work in terms of assemblage as currently understood in contemporary philosophy and literature. (Richard O'Callaghan)

Synopsis

An exploration of mental health in the drag community, centred around NYC drag queen Blackie O.

Synopsis

The VR experience, inspired by UK National Theatre director Rufus Norris’ production of SMALL ISLAND, uses immersive technologies and a life-size volumetrically captured performance to take audiences on a unique musical journey.
The ceremony of live performance and the craft of theatrical staging magnificently converge with immersive technologies and the musical direction of composer Raffy Bushman to bring a communal audience into a new kind of theatrical space. ALL KINDS OF LIMBO is a fantastical engagement of a musical performance starring Nubiya Brandon, who sings a musical narration of her life in limbo that spans the genres of reggae, grime, classical, and calypso.
Through a specially commissioned piece of music, vocalist Brandon, composer Bushman and the NuShape Orchestra take audiences through musical genres including reggae, grime, classical and calypso, reflecting the historic influence of West Indian and black culture on the UK music scene.
Official Selection Sundance Film Festival 2020 - New Frontier Exhibitions
Official Selection BFI London Film Festival 2020 - LFF Expanded

Synopsis

Go inside the cyclical centre of a Kikuyu tribal myth from Kenya, where man may become woman and woman may become man. Through virtual reality, dance, and music, a sacred space is created to explore many versions of yourself.
Official Selection Sundance Film Festival 2020 - New Frontier Exhibitions

Synopsis

A loving 16mm ode to Scottish poet and avant-garde filmmaker Margaret Tait. Artist filmmaker Luke Fowler circles her Orkney home surrounded by red tulips and buzzing insects, visits her films' locations, and zooms in on her notebooks of ideas. We also listen to Tait's poem 'Houses', about what it means to feel at home.
Official Selection International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) 2020 - Bright Futures - European premiere

Synopsis

The visuals created for Kamasi Washington’s modern jazz classic 'Hub Tones' invoke ideas of Amiri Baraka’s Nation Time and the immediate ecstatic connection Nkiru had to the rhythms of 'Hub Tones'. The main inspiration behind the film comes from a traditional ceremony called Oboni from the Ikwerre tribe - Nkiru’s tribe by heritage - whereby through repetition of movement and instrumentation, those in the material realm (this realm) go through a process of channelling divine ancestral connection into the spiritual realm. With each transmission and changing tone of the music, those taking part go deeper and deeper into a hypnotic and transcendent state until reaching a climax in the spiritual space. HUB TONES is a visual and spiritual ode to this experience.
Official Selection International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) 2020 - Perspectives

Synopsis

LOOK THEN BELOW was filmed in Somerset, a place transformed into a coloured, mist-enveloped island in an oily ocean with a cave basking in a subterranean glow. Time seems to stand still there.
After SLOW ACTION and URTH, this is the final part of a trilogy developed with American SF author Mark von Schlegell.
Official Selection International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) 2020 - Bright Future - Ammodo Tiger Short Competition - World premiere

Synopsis

The starting point for this video piece is an image of artist Maryam Jafri's sculpture 'Anxiety', that has been turned into a stock photo for licensing on a major photographic agency's website without the artist's prior knowledge or permission.
A voiceover traces the work’s trajectory from a readymade sculpture for sale at an art fair to a stock photo for licensing online and finally, to a video commissioned by a Kunstahalle, a space meant to guarantee the autonomy of art. The work reflects upon the role of originality, artist labour and copyright in our culture of sampling and remixing.
Official Selection International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) 2020 -Bright Future

Synopsis

A monster film with no monsters. Inspired by the existence of taxonomies of monsters at the heart of Early Modern European science, the film explores and reinterprets a way of seeing the natural world that is almost impossible to imagine from today’s vantage point. Early Modern naturalists were guided by a logic in which scientific truths were discovered through visual analogy. The word ‘monster’ comes from the latin ‘monstrare’, meaning to show, to reveal, to demonstrate. A DEMONSTRATION picks up on these themes in a poetic exploration of the boundaries of sight and the metamorphosis of form.
Official Selection Berlin International Film Festival 2020 - Berlinale Shorts - World premiere