An immersive installation and Virtual Reality animated and interactive artwork focussed on reproductive diseases and pain that women experience: endometriosis, fibroids, polyps, Ovarian and other cysts, cervical, ovarian, uterine and endometrial cancers.
The sensory and emotional experience moving from the outside in within a real dome space into VR space, with a 3D audio soundscape of the voices and stories of real women recounting their experiences, making it an intimate, emotional and possibly haunting experience, with accompanying wearable haptic garment providing a visceral vibration responsive on the lower abdomen, where the various diseases occur.
Some time after the death of their mother, two sisters Phoebe and Dot, both performance artists, have returned to their family home on the Isle of Wight, a large house crammed full of Edwardian bohemian memorabilia and accumulated family clutter. Before selling the house, they are working on a site specific piece which will reflect their troubled childhood memories and their mother’s work as a composer; she wrote music for both pianola and music box which included songs using the words of the Victorian poet, Mary Coleridge whose poem 'A Clever Woman' becomes the title of the film.
The action takes place over one day when the sisters’ producer/curator , Monica comes to visit. With them all is Tom, a young man who has been house-sitting; he is also an accomplished musician and the sisters have started to get him involved in their project. As the day progresses the sisters rehearse some of their mother songs and work on dramatising various aspects of her life including her complicated marriage and serial infidelity; this produces a heightened and haunting atmosphere which, coupled with an unexpected connection between Tom and Monica, leads to dramatic revelations and an explosive and poignant conclusion.
Part erotic lyric video, part theme park from hell.
The film is essentially a lyric video that tells the tale of a traumatic event through the use of text, animation and sound. The film includes various overwhelming surreal, hyper-saturated environments, beginning with a cliched CGI animation of a flower opening against a perfectly kitsch blue sky. The world then morphs into a hand-shaped planet that in some way resembles a Theme Park. Debunking the white middle-class American family, the amusement park becomes a place of hell. Sounds are amplified and screams of excitements are modified to become screams of pain. With a nod to the excess of meme culture, additional muffled, tinny sounds of Instagram clips play throughout the background on a continual loop, beginning and ending abruptly, resembling the longevity of a ten-second Instagram story. Within the film there is a prevalent sense of slippage, the text begins to get lost as you get distracted by the alluring campiness of the background visuals. Due to this fleeting time with the text, the reader ends up constructing the already written tale themselves, creating their own constructed translation of an already fractured story. The text itself is a mix of erotic and confessional writing, discussing the complexity that is inherent in a gay man's lust. Conjoining sexual fantasy with the prospect of failure, the text flips between the distinctions of reality and the delusion of erotic imagination. Containing themes of anger, desire and trauma, the text is both fictional and autobiographical.
Raymond and Keith are both homeless, variously living on the streets or bunking in Keith’s occasional temporary accommodation. Raymond is determined to climb out of the hole they are in and obtain some permanent accommodation, but will the system allow it?
Beginning in Vienna where the filmmaker meets her father, David, whom she hasn’t seen since she was two. Through a mixture of onscreen text, sit down interviews and archival footage, David’s early life as a teenage activist in Northern Ireland is revealed. The film then travels to Belfast and segues into an impossible reconstruction of David’s early years. In and attempt to better know him, Garnett uses previously recorded audio interviews to skillfully craft a lip-synced, cross-gender performance where she impersonates the his youthful presence and casts a transgender actress in the role of his girlfriend. The film cycles through various camera modes – narrative vignettes on RED alongside handheld camcorder footage of contemporary Belfast street life mixed with these verbatim re-enactments – to create a fragmented account of a teenager struggling to find an identity in a rapidly deteriorating society, and the parallel struggle of a filmmaker to connect with her estranged father. The layers of texture in this film mirror the fractured lens of history, and point to the impossibility of filmmaking as a container for 'Truth'. In TROUBLE, cinema is a means of rebuilding family ties of highlighting the complexities of representation and the construction of identity.
Official Selection BFI London Film Festival 2019 - Experimenta Strand - World premiere
With an elephant's ivory tusk as the protagonist, artist-filmmaker Jessica Sarah Rinland's film meditates upon the endless tactility of museological and ecological conservation, inviting reflection upon forms of representation, replicas, and embodiments of various materials, disciplines, and institutions.
Official Selection Locarno Film Festival 2019 - Moving Ahead - World premiere
Official Selection Toronto International Film Festival 2019 - Wavelengths
In the town of Krabi, a popular tourist destination in southern Thailand, the pre-historic, the recent past and the contemporary capitalist world awkwardly collide. The town’s local folklore and histories are promoted as attractions to foreigners, while the town’s traditional labour force is muted and hidden from the tourists’ eyes. A nameless character, whose identity continually changes, takes us around town to explore various sites that capture Krabi in its current state. These sites uniquely illustrate how Krabi’s folklore is propagated and commodified to fill the need of tourism industry.
A docu-fiction work from Ben Rivers and Anocha Suwichakornpong developed from ideas explored in their 2018 Thailand Biennale installation piece 'The Ambassadors'.
Official Selection Locarno Film Festival 2019 - Moving Ahead - World premiere
Official Selection Toronto International Film Festival 2019 - Wavelengths
Official Selection BFI London Film Festival 2019 - Special Presentation
A unique three-episode hybrid of real-time VR experience, live performance, and video essay in which three moving image makers explore how we now watch films by putting various ‘machines for viewing’ including cinema and virtual reality face to face.
Official Selection Sundance Film Festival 2020 - New Frontier
'Part One: Where There Is a Joyous Mood, There a Comrade Will Appear to Share a Glass of Wine' concerns affective relations and community building. The film is like a spell or a promise for a new and more liberating type of family structure. The film has a non-linear narrative that weaves various intimate settings, some within shared domestic spaces, others in outdoor environments. Shot in Lithuania, London, and Edinburgh, the film features the artist and her children, as well as close friends, which she considers extended family.
In the process of creating this new work, Rosalind Nashashibi questions how a group’s sense of commonality is dissolved when there is an absence of communal experience and adherence to linear time. Through an open-ended discussion of space and time travel in the film, which is in part inspired by the creation and dissolution of group relationships in Ursula Le Guin’s “The Shobies’ Story” (1990), Nashashibi explores new modes of conviviality, considering the absence of the nuclear family structure without an imperative model in sight.
Official Selection Berlinale 2019 - Forum Expanded - International premiere
On a grey day, a woman sits alone on a beach and calmly watches the birds. As she sits, she is joined by various people who make up the tapestry of her life, in a film about the fragile, fallible and human stories that compose our memories.
Barry wants to have vicarious immortality through his children but finds he can’t have kids. His friend invites him to a private club of which he is second in line, The Ancient Order Of Nocturnal Immortal Phlebotomists Of Albion, whose members live forever by sucking the blood of others. However, their membership is literally dying out because of their rare blood group – B Negative. Barry tries to help with their marketing, something he has never done before, and carries out various unpalatable tasks in return for gaining true immortality.
Following a 21-year-old artist suffering from a various mental disorders, including severe perfectionism, she will do up to 10 copies of her work, often throwing it away. After a week of practice with a tattoo gun, will she be able to tattoo someone for the first time?
