Out of the darkness a sound emerges. Terrified people take to the streets in search of its source. They get their cameras out, documenting the sky. We watch on, our muscles contract and our pupils dilate.
This film piece explores the circulation, spectatorship and undeclared politics of contemporary networked images.
A film centred upon the dramatic and volatile landscape of Iceland; interfusing the cultural, political and ecological forces that shape the island. The film combines Iceland's remarkable terrain with two corresponding voice-overs from the past and present: poet W.H. Auden, reading ‘Journey to Iceland’ (1937), and environmental activist Ómar Ragnarsson.
A traumatised patient, trapped in a destructive relationship with her megalomaniac doctor, resorts to desperate measures to escape. Legal text and medical records interwoven with pulsing pills tell a story of addictive, emotional enmeshment.
Taking inspiration from Felice Casorati's painting 'Eggs on a Book', photographers Metz+Racine and film director Mototake Makishima collaborated to create a 'still-life' short film. Set in Italy of the 1940's against a backdrop of political unrest, the film explores the mysterious world of objects and the enigmatic symbolism of eggs.
’Unseen: The Lives of Looking’ focuses on four individuals with a distinct relationship to looking - an eye surgeon, a planetary explorer, a human rights lawyer and an artist/filmmaker. Told through Dryden Goodwin’s closely observed drawings, camera work and multilayered soundtrack, it explores different scales, forms and reasons for looking, in a poetic and metaphysically charged journey. Revealing the empathy and dexterity of an eye surgeon, working with the fragile human eye; the quest of a NASA planetary explorer to decode the cosmos and find evidence of life on Mars; and the scrutiny of the British government, by a human rights lawyer, in extraordinary rendition, drone attack and mass surveillance cases. The film’s perspectives range from minute details to panoramic expanses, building an atmospheric and sensual matrix around its subjects. Goodwin includes fleeting vignettes of strangers and a brief focus on his father and son, highlighting the tension in his work between intimacy and anonymity. The film considers both the physical act of looking and how we perceive the world around us: how we contemplate the known and the unknown, the personal and the remote and the imaginative leaps taken to reveal what might be concealed or out of sight.
An impressionist journey through the archive of the Leeds Pavilion, which in the 1980s started out as a feminist photo studio. Former members, male and female, give their vision of the studio’s artistic and activist past, the reasons for which are as current as ever.
International Film Festival Rotterdam 2015 - World premiere
Dreams Rewired traces the desires and anxieties of today’s hyper-connected world back more than a hundred years, when telephone, film and television were new. As revolutionary then as contemporary social media is today, early electric media sparked a fervent utopianism in the public imagination – promising total communication, the annihilation of distance, an end to war. But then, too, there were fears over the erosion of privacy, security, morality.
Using rare (and often unseen) archival material from nearly 200 films to articulate the present, Dreams Rewired reveals a history of hopes to share, and betrayals to avoid.
Eyrie documents a visit to commemorative building built by the communist party in Bulgaria. The action taken by the artist at the centre of the work suggests an exploration as a space for play and speculation, displacing the insistent materiality of the site and the reverence of the ruin.
The Collector's Case was produced during Yelena Popova’s residency at Upton House, a National Trust property in Warwickshire. The video records the time Popova spent working with the collection of paintings at Upton House and reflects on the temporality of a painting collection.
The Lawes of the Marches documents the ancient border tradition of the Common Ridings all along the border of England and Scotland. These ridings are about marking and commemorating the past with as much relevance today as when they began in 1500.
Part of the ongoing work, 'Fucking Finland', exploring unintended cultural chinks and links in the old Iron Curtain, 'Your Silent Face' follows the dockers of Rostock at rest, as a Baltic ferry leaves port for Hanko in Finland.
