A HUMAN CERTAINTY by Morgan Quaintance

A Human Certainty follows the neurotic ramblings of a death-obsessed romantic in the throes of post-breakup blues. The street photographer Weegee, Saint Lidwina, and the filmmaker’s own spiritualist grandmother all come together to reflect on a particularly painful day at the beach.

Bio:

Morgan Quaintance is a London-based artist and writer.

His moving image work has been shown and exhibited widely at festivals and institutions including: MOMA, New York; Mcevoy Foundaton for the Arts, San Francisco; Konsthall C, Sweden; David Dale, Glasgow; European Media Art Festival, Germany; Alchemy Film and Arts Festival, Scotland;  Images Festival, Toronto; International Film Festival Rotterdam; and Third Horizon Film Festival, Miami.

Over the past ten years, his critically incisive writings on contemporary art, aesthetics and their socio-political contexts, have featured in publications including Art Monthly, the Wire, and the Guardian, and helped shape the landscape of discourse and debate in the UK. A key reference here is his 2017 text The New Conservatism: Complicity and the UK Art World’s Performance of Progression. From 2012 – 2023 he was the producer and presenter of Studio Visit, an interview-based radio programme for London’s Resonance 104.4FM. 

NAZARBAZI by Maryam Tafakory 

NAZARBAZI (“the play of glances”) is a film about love and desire in post-revolution Iranian cinema, where depictions of intimacy and touch between women and men are prohibited.

The film focuses primarily on images of women whose bodies have been erased and victimised in post-revolution cinema, and alludes to discreet forms of communication that operate within, yet also circumnavigate the censors. It attempts to touch the spaces we cannot touch; inner feelings/sensations – but also untouchability beyond physical contact: unspoken prohibitions/regulators that may only unveil as embodied experiences. The film uses poetry and silence as the only language/s with which we can attempt to touch these spaces of socio-political ambiguities.

Bio:

Maryam Tafakory (b.Shiraz/Iran) works with images, words, and feelings to create textual and filmic collages that stitch together poetry, documentary, performance, archival, and found material. She is interested in depictions of erasure, secrecy, and the violence of invisible regulatory bodies. Her research-based projects look at what is often neglected and discarded as trivial, excessive, or unscientific. She has an ongoing body of video essays in dialogue with post-revolution Iranian cinema. Based between Shiraz and London, she completed her MFA at Oxford University, and her work has been exhibited internationally, including MoMA; NYFF; Locarno; TIFF; Cannes’ Directors Fortnight; IFFR; Oberhausen; FICUNAM; ICA London; HKW Berlin; True/False; M HKA; and Anthology Film Archives amongst others. She was awarded the Gold Hugo at the 58th Chicago Int’l Film Festival, The Tiger Short Award at the 51st IFFR, Barbara Hammer Feminist Film Award at the 60th Ann Arbor Film Festival, and the Best Experimental Short Film at the 70th MIFF amongst others. Her work has appeared in Criterion’s Daily, Sight&Sound, and Filmmaker Magazine. She was selected for Videonale.17, and Bloomberg New Contemporaries, and twice awarded the Aesthetica Emerging Art Prize in 2017 and 2019. She was the 2019 Flaherty/Colgate Distinguished Global Filmmaker in Residence and she was a MacDowell Fellow in 2022.

TOMORROW EVERYTHING WILL BE ALRIGHT by Akram Zaatari

A late-night chat between two former lovers who have not been in contact for ten years transforms into a compelling elegy of loss and longing. Patiently cadenced to the rhythm of words being typed on a piece of paper, Zaatari skillfully mixes technologies of communication and recording to navigate time and temporal gaps.

Bio:

Akram Zaatari (b.1966, Lebanon) has produced more than fifty films and videos, all sharing an interest in writing histories, pursuing a range of interconnected themes, subjects, and practices related to excavation, political resistance, the lives of former militants, the legacy of an exhausted left, the circulation of images in times of war, and the play of tenses inherent to various letters that have been lost, found, buried, discovered, or otherwise delayed in reaching their destinations. Zaatari has played a critical role in developing the formal, intellectual, and institutional infrastructure of Beirut’s contemporary art scene. As a co-founder of the Arab Image Foundation, he has made invaluable and uncompromising contributions to the wider discourse on preservation and archival practice. Zaatari represented Lebanon at the Venice Biennial in 2013 with his film LETTER TO A REFUSING PILOT. His work has been featured at Documenta13 in 2012.

TRUST by Jill Magid 

In 2004, Jill spent 31 days in Liverpool, during which time she developed a close relationship with Citywatch (Merseyside Police and Liverpool City Council), whose function is citywide video surveillance- the largest system of its kind in England.

The videos in her Evidence Locker were staged and edited by the artist and filmed by the police using the public surveillance cameras in the city centre. Wearing a bright red trench coat she would call the police on duty with details of where she was and ask them to film her in particular poses, places or even guide her through the city with her eyes closed.

Unless requested as evidence, CCTV footage obtained from the system is stored for 31 days before being erased. For access to this footage, Magid had to submit 31 Subject Access Request Forms – the legal document necessary to outline to the police details of how and when an ‘incident’ occurred. Magid chose to complete these forms as though they were letters to a lover, expressing how she was feeling and what she was thinking. These letters form the diary One Cycle of Memory in the City of L- an intimate portrait of the relationship between herself, the police and the city.  

Bio:

American artist Jill Magid’s work is deeply ingrained in her lived experience, exploring and blurring the boundaries between art and life. Through her performance-based practice, Magid has initiated intimate relations with a number of organizations and structures of authority. She explores the emotional, philosophical, and legal tensions between the individual and ‘protective’ institutions, such as intelligence agencies or the police. To work alongside or within large organizations, Magid makes use of institutional quirks, systemic loopholes that allow her to make contact with people ‘on the inside’. Her work tends to be characterized by the dynamics of seduction, the resulting narratives often taking the form of a love story. It is typical of Magid’s practice that she follows the rules of engagement with an institution to the letter – sometimes to the point of absurdity.

ON A DAY LIKE TODAY by Mohammad Shawky Hassan

Solitary streets… I never understood the function of remembering… The magic of black and white… I will spend my lifetime chasing the illusion of a perfect image… Awareness of the silence… And today as I try to remember, I wish I had an image.

Bio:

Mohammad Shawky Hassan lives and works in Berlin. Spending most of his life in Cairo, Egypt, he studied philosophy, filmmaking, video production, and media studies at the American University and the Academy of Cinematic Arts and Sciences in Cairo; as well as Columbia University in New York. His work has been screened and exhibited in galleries, cinema theaters, museums, contemporary art spaces, film festivals and educational institutions, like Berlinale – Forum Expanded, The Museum of Modern Art in New York (MoMA), Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW), MUCEM, Anthology Film Archives, Sursock Museum, Contemporary Image Collective – CIC, Semaine des Arts at Paris 8 University, Festival dei Poppoli, Kassel Film and Video Festival and Bucharest International Experimental Film Festival, among others. Most recently, Hassan’s feature-length film Bashtaalak sa’at | Shall I Compare You to a Summer’s Day? (2022) was presented at the 2022 Berlinale Forum and nominated for the 36. TEDDY AWARD.

South, 28’, 2020

 It is in the spaces and cracks between images that South as a film comes into being. This film is an expressive study of anti-racist and anti-authoritarian movements in southern communities: Chicago’s South Side and South London (where Quaintance lives), and the American Deep South, as well as South Africa during the apartheid regime. South as a metaphor for geographical division helps to grasp just how big the world is and how important is interconnection. Through a mix of analogue 16mm celluloid and images from Google Street View, Quaintance’s abstract editing patterns and sensitive approach to his protagonists makes South a film that is largely created by ourselves as we watch it. South examines the relationship between the individual and the collective, between theory and practice, social responsibility and the openings from which positive change can come about.

Missing Time, 15’ 2019

 Nationhood and selfhood — concepts maintained through memory. Withdrawal of key memories or histories lead to a distorted conception of the self or the nation’
Quote from the Missing Time.

Missing Time is about memory and its loss, about historical, personal and national memory and self-perception. The film merges two powerful and vivid stories, which are not told directly but whose meanings and impact are observed from the relative distance of today in black and white imagery. One of the film’s storylines is inspired by an account of an American biracial couple from the 1970s, Betty and Barney Hills. The couple claimed that they had been abducted by the aliens –– it was the first widespread story of alien abductions in the US. In cooperation with the National Security Agency, they were plunged into intense hypnosis sessions to delve into the wife’s dreams. Throughout the film, it remains unclear what exactly has happened, but the photographs and the woman’s voice convey their strong experiences. The second visual storyline emerging at this historical moment –– archival footage of British colonial history and concentration camps in Kenya –– creates an interaction resulting in a powerful metaphor questioning history, other people’s and other countries’ dreams, the powerful methods of managing people’s thoughts and memories and a strong feeling of love between two people. 

Another Decade, 27’, 2018

Another Decade combines archive footage from the 1990s with newly shot 16mm film and standard definition video. Starting from testimonies and statements made by artists and art historians during the 1994 INIVA conference ‘Towards a New Internationalism’, Another Decade ranges across diverse cultural territory and is propelled by a sense that very little socio-cultural or institutional change has taken place in the United Kingdom since that time. The dynamic tension explored in the work is between, on the one hand, art world actors speaking a truth to institutional power and, on the other, lived realities of London’s multiracial citizenry, those who necessarily inhabit a centre of otherness.