Program: Record of Light & Shadow
Curated by Alyssa Micha
TRT: 63.5 min
The Day Lives Briefly Unscented (Brandon Wilson, 5 min, 2020, USA): "The Day Lives Briefly Unscented" expresses thoughts and emotions about the limits of understanding and the transformation of things. The words of a poem appear in a staggered rhythm on top of images of houses, the natural world and the filmmaker's family. Each shot was created by covering and uncovering the lens with the hand. The resulting footage was then arranged in a layered sequence so that images interact as they appear and disappear. Text adapted from poems by Jane Hirshfield and Christian Wiman.
Psychic Meat (Stephen Wardell, 9.5 min, 2020, USA): "The film is a diary and act of bearing witness in which Wardell tells of his father’s artificial heart valve, the industrial farming industry that both provided the tissue for it and arguably hastened its necessity, and their somewhat distant father-son relationship. Wardell hand-developed this film in salt which resulted in a shimmering pock-marked effect on the celluloid which emphasises the film’s own materiality and physical precarity in line with the earthbound fleshiness of the maker’s voiceover narrative. However, the salt’s implications as a curing agent for meat and the way its visual impact brings together threads of preservation – of his father’s life, of their mutual love, of the detachment they have felt for years – and the latent imagery of these things hanging and curing over time, becomes quietly overwhelming." - Ben Nicholson, Alt/Kino
Eclipse in The Garden (Yuula Benivolski, 6.5 min, 2021, Canada): My mother always wanted a garden, and now she has one. A poem about family genealogy that highlights the relationship between a name and a place. *** Tatars and other non-Russian communities in the USSR were forced to go through Russification - the spread of Russian language, culture, and people into non-Russian cultures and regions. Forcing the many minority groups within Russia to accept the Russian culture was an attempt to prevent self-determination and separatism. As a result my mother, a Tatar woman born in Moscow, never properly learned her mother tongue or practiced Tatar traditions outside her family home. Composed of super 8 home movies.
Still Life (Alex Ingersoll, 5.5 min, 2020, USA): you left in october. we've been walking ever since. caught between brief awakenings, one step after another. the wind picked up here / here / here / / / /
Beauty & the Beasts (Aggie Pak Yee Lee, 4 min, 2021, Hong Kong): That night, a lady met a lovely beast, a gigantic slimy cheesy one.
Light On a Wall 2 (Andrew Payne, 2 min, 2020, UK): This silent film is from a body of work made in the film maker's home during the Covid-19 pandemic when he found it difficult to make other work due to social distancing. The work consists of films of the walls of the interior of his house, or views of the outside world filmed through windows of the house. This is a short time lapse film showing the movement of areas of light and shadows across a wall in the corner of a room over a period of several hours.
KUDO (Yannick Dauby, 11 min, 2021, Taiwan): Kudo, a Japanese researcher and hiker disappeared in the mountains of Taiwan. Looking after his traces, his images.
The Body is a Gesture (Guli Silberstein, 6 min, 2021, UK): An AI computer-vision system reconstructs footage of humanity in different contexts - business, love, city, joy, protest. The next-frame-prediction technology is trying to predict the future based on just a couple of seconds from each clip, producing surprisingly hallucinatory video outputs, engaging with surrealist and expressionist painting tradition. The AI-produced material is arranged by the human artist in a narrative reflecting on the tenderness of the human body, the implications of AI interacting with it, and the politics of its usage. We are a viral breath, one embodiment, connected to each other physically, socially and psychologically. Now it's becoming mediated by machines, controlled by corporations and governments. The work explores senses of touch and body as seen by algorithmic processes.
GRID (Alexandre Alagôa, 14 min, 2021, Portugal): A ritual of grids, reflections and chasms; a complete state of entropy; a space that devours itself; a vertigo that destroys the gravity of the Earth; a trap that captures us inside the voids of the screen of light: «That blank arena wherein converge at once the hundred spaces» (Hollis Frampton).
Curated by Alyssa Micha
TRT: 63.5 min
The Day Lives Briefly Unscented (Brandon Wilson, 5 min, 2020, USA): "The Day Lives Briefly Unscented" expresses thoughts and emotions about the limits of understanding and the transformation of things. The words of a poem appear in a staggered rhythm on top of images of houses, the natural world and the filmmaker's family. Each shot was created by covering and uncovering the lens with the hand. The resulting footage was then arranged in a layered sequence so that images interact as they appear and disappear. Text adapted from poems by Jane Hirshfield and Christian Wiman.
Psychic Meat (Stephen Wardell, 9.5 min, 2020, USA): "The film is a diary and act of bearing witness in which Wardell tells of his father’s artificial heart valve, the industrial farming industry that both provided the tissue for it and arguably hastened its necessity, and their somewhat distant father-son relationship. Wardell hand-developed this film in salt which resulted in a shimmering pock-marked effect on the celluloid which emphasises the film’s own materiality and physical precarity in line with the earthbound fleshiness of the maker’s voiceover narrative. However, the salt’s implications as a curing agent for meat and the way its visual impact brings together threads of preservation – of his father’s life, of their mutual love, of the detachment they have felt for years – and the latent imagery of these things hanging and curing over time, becomes quietly overwhelming." - Ben Nicholson, Alt/Kino
Eclipse in The Garden (Yuula Benivolski, 6.5 min, 2021, Canada): My mother always wanted a garden, and now she has one. A poem about family genealogy that highlights the relationship between a name and a place. *** Tatars and other non-Russian communities in the USSR were forced to go through Russification - the spread of Russian language, culture, and people into non-Russian cultures and regions. Forcing the many minority groups within Russia to accept the Russian culture was an attempt to prevent self-determination and separatism. As a result my mother, a Tatar woman born in Moscow, never properly learned her mother tongue or practiced Tatar traditions outside her family home. Composed of super 8 home movies.
Still Life (Alex Ingersoll, 5.5 min, 2020, USA): you left in october. we've been walking ever since. caught between brief awakenings, one step after another. the wind picked up here / here / here / / / /
Beauty & the Beasts (Aggie Pak Yee Lee, 4 min, 2021, Hong Kong): That night, a lady met a lovely beast, a gigantic slimy cheesy one.
Light On a Wall 2 (Andrew Payne, 2 min, 2020, UK): This silent film is from a body of work made in the film maker's home during the Covid-19 pandemic when he found it difficult to make other work due to social distancing. The work consists of films of the walls of the interior of his house, or views of the outside world filmed through windows of the house. This is a short time lapse film showing the movement of areas of light and shadows across a wall in the corner of a room over a period of several hours.
KUDO (Yannick Dauby, 11 min, 2021, Taiwan): Kudo, a Japanese researcher and hiker disappeared in the mountains of Taiwan. Looking after his traces, his images.
The Body is a Gesture (Guli Silberstein, 6 min, 2021, UK): An AI computer-vision system reconstructs footage of humanity in different contexts - business, love, city, joy, protest. The next-frame-prediction technology is trying to predict the future based on just a couple of seconds from each clip, producing surprisingly hallucinatory video outputs, engaging with surrealist and expressionist painting tradition. The AI-produced material is arranged by the human artist in a narrative reflecting on the tenderness of the human body, the implications of AI interacting with it, and the politics of its usage. We are a viral breath, one embodiment, connected to each other physically, socially and psychologically. Now it's becoming mediated by machines, controlled by corporations and governments. The work explores senses of touch and body as seen by algorithmic processes.
GRID (Alexandre Alagôa, 14 min, 2021, Portugal): A ritual of grids, reflections and chasms; a complete state of entropy; a space that devours itself; a vertigo that destroys the gravity of the Earth; a trap that captures us inside the voids of the screen of light: «That blank arena wherein converge at once the hundred spaces» (Hollis Frampton).
