#4 Cellular Imagining: Life Online & Its Refractions
This programme for PW Magazine’s online video platform, presented two films exploring our relationship to the internet within the context of shifting environments.
It was the second installment in the online video series, To Surge Is To Spray Forth To The Sky, organised by Anna Rimmel.
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One Thousand and One Attempts to Be an Ocean (2021) dir. Wang Yuyan 11”
Huahua’s Dazzling World and its Myriad Temptations (2022) dir. Daphne Xu 82”
Wang Yuyan’s short film, ONE THOUSAND AND ONE ATTEMPTS TO BE AN OCEAN uses found-footage video clips to form a wave of images that speak to both our growing attention economy and the anxieties around the fast-changing climate. Daphne Xu’s (@daphmoney) debut feature film, HUAHUA’S DAZZLING WORLD AND ITS MYRIAD TEMPTATIONS, follows the life of Huahua, a livestreamer on Kuaishou who lives in the rapidly-changing Xiongan New Area, the government-planned ‘city of the future’ in north-eastern China.
Synergie: Phantasm & Protest
17 September 2023, Haus der Kulturen der Welt
Synergie: Phantasm & Protest is a two-day film festival showcasing three different film collectives on the 8th and 17th of September at HKW, organised by @synergie.world. Our event will be taking place on Sunday 17th September, from 5pm to 7pm. Free, no booking required.
HYPERFATE (Christelle Oyiri, France 2023, 13")
THE LAST ANGEL OF HISTORY (John Akomfrah, UK, 1995, 45")
This programme uses cosmological and allegorical lenses to explore black musical creation and its consumption. While Christelle Oyiri’s diaristic short film HYPERFATE looks to success as an omen that paradoxically plagues black communities, from the banlieues of Paris to the sidewalks of Brooklyn, John Akomfrah’s seminal essay film, THE LAST ANGEL OF HISTORY, surveys science fiction and the otherworldly reference points of funk, dub, jazz, and techno pioneers to chronicle the histories of black musical tradition. The two films illuminate both the unparalleled cultural impact and complete alienation that haunt black diasporic artists and their experiences.
For more information see: https://www.hkw.de/en/programme/events/synergie-phantasm-protest
If The Sky Sounds So Loud
6 April 2023, Institute Of Contemporary Arts
This programme probes the political and philosophical nature of the night sky, featuring new non-fiction work by artists from Morocco and Afghanistan, ruminating on the human condition bound by the cosmos.
In Fragments From Heaven, meteorite showers descending upon the Moroccan Sahara create communion between the desert and cosmos, while providing a lifeline for the region’s inhabitants. For some, these splintered comets help elucidate an inquiry into the origins of life, for others, they promise a more urgent and material means of sustenance, in the context of a radically changing labour market disturbing traditional nomadic lifestyles. For both groups, this astrological activity presents a meandering and high-stakes quest in a landscape so often portrayed as void.
Takbir explores the sonic memory of Afghanistan’s capital city Kabul and its various foreign occupations, filmed the night after the Taliban took power in 2021. Shouts of ‘Allahu Akbar’ ring out and obscuring its orators, Hazara’s camera follows its reverberations throughout a dizzying, fluorescent sky, at the turn of a new day and a new political regime.
Programme:
UK PREMIERE Fragments From Heaven, dir. Adnane Baraka, Morocco 2022, 84 min., Arabic with English subtitles
Takbir, dir. Aziz Hazara, Afghanistan 2022, 10 min., no dialogue
Tickets: https://ica.art/films/opensources-if-the-sky-sounds-so-loud
