Jarman Now!

11.20am

Introduction

11.30am – 12.30pm

Screening programme:

Melanie Manchot, Liquid Skin (2023), 23’

Maeve Brennan, An Excavation (2022), 20’

Sin Wai Kin, Dreaming the End (2023), 21’

1.30 – 2.30pm

Melanie Manchot will be in conversation with writer Isobel Harbison to explore themes of gendered labour and night time in Liquid Skin (2023). They will also talk about the making of Manchot’s debut feature STEPHEN (2023), an experimental fiction documentary that examines addiction and mental health, made in collaboration with a recovery group in Liverpool. STEPHEN will screen as part of the Jarman Touring Programme screening weekend at Whitechapel Gallery (Sat 30 Nov – Sun 1 Dec).

2.45 – 3.45pm

Maeve Brennan will be joined by writer and curator Erika Balsom for a discussion of her work An Excavation. The film documents an investigation into the unknown origins of three crates of ancient vases, seized from a disgraced antiquities dealer implicated in the trafficking of looted archaeological treasures. The conversation will also explore wider themes around the economies of objects that are present in her 2017 work The Drift, and a major new moving image piece currently in production.

4 – 5pm

Sin Wai Kin will be joined by curator, writer and researcher Maggie Matić to talk through how their practice imagines new ways of thinking beyond binary categories. Filmed on location in the historic city of Rome, Dreaming the End (2023) interrogates how the repetition and retelling of narratives can construct a collective sense of reality. The talk will be preceded by a screening of The Breaking Story (2022), in which two characters, The Storyteller and Change (who also appear in Dreaming the End), appear in three different guises to broadcast the news from six parallel universes.

5pm – 5.10pm

Closing comments

5.10pm – 6pm

Drinks

11.20am

Introduction

11.30am – 12.30pm

Screening Programme:

Larry Achiampong, A Letter (Side B) (2023), 20’

Trigger warning: A Letter (Side B) contains references to suicide, depression, and being sectioned which some viewers may find sensitive or distressing.

Maryam Tafakory, Nazarbazi (2022), 19’

Rosalind Nashashibi, The Invisible Worm (2024), 17’

1.30 – 2.30pm

A presentation of Larry Achiampong’s A Pledge (2024), which explores the interconnected states of generational trauma, mental and physical health, and communal agency. Depicted through a third-person monologue (voiced by the artist’s son, Sinai Lee Achiampong-Rose), the film addresses issues of abandonment, inherited trauma and seclusion, whilst holding onto the rejuvenated promise of connection. After the screening, Achiampong will be in discussion with Architect, artist and filmmaker Jayden Ali about the work and A Letter (Side B), which are part of his GH0ST_DATA_Series.

2.45 – 3.45pm

An audio-visual presentation by Maryam Tafakory that draws on the screening-performance works that form part of her practice.

Revisiting films made in Iran after 1979, this ongoing performance I Want To Tell You What I Can’t is an archival search for the unwritten and the unspoken—a search for forgotten names, forbidden bodies, and the disappearances of women both on and off the screen.

4 – 5pm

A presentation of selected film works by Rosalind Nashashibi, filmed over years and chronicling Palestinian life, followed by a Q&A with the artist.

Electrical Gaza (2015), 17 mins
Hreash House (2004), 20 mins
Dahiet Al Bareed, District of the Post Office (2002), 7 mins

5pm – 5.10pm

Closing comments

5.10pm – 6pm

Drinks

Larry Achiampong‘s projects employ imagery, aural and visual archives, live performance, and sound to intricately explore the complexities of class, cross-cultural dynamics, and postdigital identity. By crate-digging the echoes of history, Achiampong examines the hybridity of his heritage alongside the intersection between popular culture and the legacies of colonisation. These investigations scrutinise constructions of ‘the self’ through the splicing of audible and visual materials of personal and interpersonal archives. In doing so, he offers multiple perspectives that reveal the deeply entrenched inequalities in contemporary society.

Maeve Brennan is an artist and filmmaker based in London. Her practice explores the historical and political resonance of material and place. Working across moving image, installation, sculpture and printed matter, her works excavate layered histories, revealing the unseen structures that determine our lived environment.

Across film, video, photography and sound, Melanie Manchot‘s work pursues enquiries into the processes that lead towards our individual and collective identities. Her projects interrogate and employ acts of care, resistance and communality to engage in discourses on social and political urgencies. Performance-to-camera, reconstruction and participation as well as location-based research are recurring methodologies in her work. Using cameras as organizing principles, works operate on the threshold of documentary and staged events to investigate how fact, fiction and observation offer strategies for speaking about our shifting place in an increasingly mediated world.

Rosalind Nashashibi is a London based artist of Northern Irish and Palestinian descent. Her media are film and painting, and paintings appear frequently in her films, which chronicle intimate moments of contemporary life with an empathetic and personal approach. Nashashibi is preoccupied with looking, in a way that almost crosses over into the other camp, passing onto the side of the subject in a way that can be disconcerting or funny. Her films are punctuated by manifestations of power dynamics and collective histories. Subjects have included non-nuclear family structures, the multiple versions of the artist myth and chronicling life in Palestine.

Sin Wai Kin brings fantasy to life through storytelling in moving image, performance, writing, and print. Drawing on experiences of existing between binary categories, their work realizes alternate worlds to describe lived experiences of desire, identification and consciousness.

Working at the intersection of cinema and live performance, Maryam Tafakory (b. Shiraz, Iran) makes textual and filmic collages that attempt to dissect concealed acts of erasure – of bodies, intimacies, and histories.

Jayden Ali is an Architect, artist and filmmaker, and has been recognised as a key voice in shaping the future of our cities by the Design Museum, Vogue and Wallpaper Magazine, whilst also being included on the Architects’ Journal’s prestigious ’40 Under 40’ list. He is a Mayor’s Design Advocate, is part of the Hackney Regeneration Design Advisory Group and sits on the London Legacy Development Corporation Quality Review Panel. In 2023, Jayden co-curated the British Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, with the exhibition ‘Dancing Before the Moon’ being awarded a prestigious special mention. He is an alumni of the Architecture Association, The Cass and the University of East London. 

Erika Balsom is a Reader in Film and Media Studies at King’s College London. She is the author of four books, including After Uniqueness: A History of Film and Video Art in Circulation (Columbia University Press, 2017) and TEN SKIES (Fireflies Press, 2021). Her writing has appeared in venues such as Artforum, Cahiers du cinéma, Cinema Scope, e-flux, Frieze, Grey Room, New Left Review, and Screen, and she is the author of catalogue essays on leading artists including Amar Kanwar, Christian Marclay, and Sarah Sze, and Jeff Wall. With Hila Peleg, she is the editor of Documentary Across Disciplines (MIT Press, 2016) and Feminist Worldmaking and the Moving Image (MIT Press, 2022). She was the co-curator of the retrospective exhibition “Peggy Ahwesh: Vision Machines” (Spike Island, Bristol/Kunsthall Stavanger, 2021/22) and of the exhibition and film programme “No Master Territories: Feminist Worldmaking and the Moving Image” (Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin/Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw, 2022/23).

Dr Isobel Harbison is an art historian and Senior Lecturer in the Art Department, Goldsmiths. She writes for a range of art, film and culture magazines. Her first book considered histories of performance and moving image in relation to the rise of social media (Performing Image, MIT Press, 2019). Her second book is a history of one woman’s neon sign designs in 1950s Las Vegas (MUP, forthcoming). Shortlisted for the Hay Festival Writer’s Award, she is a 2024 Eccles Fellow at the British Library and a 2024-2025 Eadington Fellow at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

Dr Maggie Matić (they/them) is a curator, writer and researcher with a specialism in contemporary feminist, crip and queer visual culture. Maggie is currently Director at Auto Italia, London. They have previously worked at Studio Voltaire, Somerset House, Tate, FACT (Foundation for Art & Creative Technology) and The University of Liverpool.

Larry Achiampong, A Letter (Side B) (2023), 20’

A Letter (Side B) looks at the affective impact of history, immigration and geographical separation on two brothers living in Britain and Ghana. The film collapses time, exploring how the past interrupts and impacts in the present and incorporates recent footage filmed by Achiampong in Ghana as well as archival footage from The Museum of African Art: The Veda and Dr Zdravko Pečar Collection in Belgrade, Serbia.

Speaking from a deeply personal perspective, the film additionally utilises older technologies from a ‘hacked’ Game Boy Camera, which Achiampong modified to enable the capture of moving images via HDMI. Through the marriage of storytelling and the use of retro technology, the exploration of time travel and the concept of ‘Sanko-time’ becomes possible. Coined by Larry in 2017, the term relates to the Ghanaian Adinkra symbol and indigenous Akan term ‘Sankofa’, meaning to ‘go back and retrieve’.

Trigger warning: this film contains references to suicide, depression, and being sectioned which some viewers may find sensitive or distressing.

Maeve Brennan, An Excavation (2022), 20’

In 2014, 45 crates of looted antiquities were discovered at Geneva Freeport in a warehouse belonging to disgraced antiquities dealer Robin Symes. They contained tens of thousands of archaeological remnants worth around £7 million. Three of the crates were sent to forensic archaeologists Dr Christos Tsirogiannis and Dr Vinnie Norskov for research. An Excavation documents Tsirogiannis and Norskov’s investigation into a series of vases from the Geneva Freeport crates. Made in the 4th century BC by Apulian artisans, these vases remained buried in tombs for 2500 years before they were clandestinely excavated from their now irrecoverable contexts. The objects’ journeys through the hands of looters, smugglers, restorers and dealers are counterpointed by the hand-painted stories that adorn them. Made for burials, the vases depict scenes from the underworld – forensic and mythological narratives start to intertwine.

Melanie Manchot, Liquid Skin (2023), 23’

Filmed between dusk and dawn, Liquid Skin follows nine women, all performing night-time labour, including a baker, pole dancer, care worker, nightclub security. Filmed on infrared in single-shot sequences the work raises questions on gendered experiences of the night, while drawing attention to the hidden labour and backstage rhythms of our contemporary societies.

Rosalind Nashashibi, The Invisible Worm (2024), 17’

The Invisible Worm is a funny / serious film with spontaneous moments of joy, physicality and thinking aloud. The subtext of the film is the mythical persona of the artist, and how artist friends lean in to one another, leading to both innocent and corrupted effects. Nashashibi’s long term collaborator Elena Narbutaitė is the film’s protagonist and co-writer, and other artist protagonists include a male model, Nashashibi’s teenage son Pietro and a cat called Brother Alyosha. Marie and Rosalind appear, as do their works, their studios and the gallery where they showed together.

William Blake’s poem ‘The Sick Rose’ from 1794 is a recurring text throughout the film. The invisible worm appears itself, at first as an embarrassing ‘hair in the gate’ stuck on the surface of the 16mm film, then mutating into an animated worm. It can be read as a note of corruption entering on multiple levels, that of the individual through over-awareness through the creative process itself, at the level of desire in late capitalist society when the worm travels across the temptingly glamorous images of a fashion magazine and finally with the worm penetrating UK Parliament building at Westminster, highlighting the ongoing imperialist actions of the British political establishment, a three-fold face of corruption.

Sin Wai Kin, Dreaming the End (2023), 21’

Filmed on location in 2022, Dreaming the End questions the role of storytelling against the historic city of Rome. By referencing classical sculpture and cinematic genres including the Italian Giallo films of the 60’s and 70’s, the film asks: where does authenticity end and performance begin? Who decides this? Dreaming the End interrogates how the repetition and retelling of stories and mythology constructs a collective sense of reality, offering metamorphosis and the possibility of transformed perspectives.

Maryam Tafakory, Nazarbazi (2022), 19’

Nazarbazi [the play of glances] is a film about love and desire in 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.

The Film London Jarman Award 2024 | Film London 

Inspired by visionary British filmmaker Derek Jarman, the Award recognises and supports artists working with the moving image. The shortlisted artists illustrate the spirit of inventiveness within moving image, highlighting the breadth of creativity and craftsmanship the medium has to offer, as well as its powerful ability to engage and provoke audiences. The Award comes with a £10,000 prize.