Film London Jarman Award Weekend 2019

A Screen Test for an Adaptation of Giselle by Cécile B. Evans is a screen test for a feature length adaptation of the Industrial-era ballet Giselle as an eco-feminist thriller. The infamous original tells the story of a fragile woman betrayed to death who rises in an afterlife propagated by a group of so-called scorned women. This adaptation is reimagined in a near-future where Giselle and her friends have moved on from a failed metropolis to her mother’s rural village to “reset society”. An invasion of their successful community by an unnamed presence sets off a contamination of their newly formed ecosystem with old power dynamics. Here, Giselle’s death emerges as an investigation into mutability and multiplicity as a strategy for escape, with the natural force of bacteria as an unexpected ally. With visuals that sew together high and low resolution digital footage, 16mm,  and VHS recordings with animation, deep AI, and image upscaling techniques, the screen test serves as a sketch for a hybridised world where multiple realities simultaneously push to the surface. At the centre is the tension between the violence of essentialism and the fierce recalcitrance of solidarity, emotions, identity, data, and nature alike. Supported by La Maison Balmain Paris.

Chick Strand’s SOFT FICTION is a personal documentary that brilliantly portrays the survival power of female sensuality. It combines the documentary approach with a sensuous lyrical expressionism. Strand focuses her camera on people talking about their own experience, capturing subtle nuances in facial expressions and gestures that are rarely seen in cinema. The title SOFT FICTION works on several levels. It evokes the soft line between truth and fiction that characterizes Strand’s own approach to documentary, and suggests the idea of softcore fiction, which is appropriate to the film’s erotic content and style. It’s rare to find an erotic film with a female perspective dominating both the narrative discourse and the visual and audio rhythms with which the film is structured. Strand continues to celebrate in her brilliant, innovative personal documentaries her theme, the reaffirmation of the tough resilience of the human spirit.” – Marsha Kinder, Film Quarterly.

Content Warning: SOFT FICTION features discussion of adult themes, viewer discretion is advised. Please contact us if you require further information.

Amal Khalaf is a researcher, curator and currently Projects Curator at the Serpentine Galleries, working on the On the Edgware Road project. She is also Commissioning Editor (Projects) at Ibraaz and a founding member of the GCC Collective, a multi-disciplinary collective that explores questions of identity and institutions across the Gulf, and with an MA in Contemporary Art Theory from Goldsmiths, her research addresses themes of urbanism, community media activism and art through participatory projects and media initiatives.

Elena Gorfinkel is Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at Kings College. Her research explores post-1960s independent cinema in the United States and histories of marginal filmmaking practices, especially of women and queer filmmakers, in adult film, experimental, and underground cinemas. She is author of Lewd Looks: American Sexploitation Cinema in the 1960s, and co-editor of the volumes Taking Place: Location and the Moving Image and Global Cinema Networks. She is the recipient of a 2018 Creative Capital/Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant for her second book, “Aesthetic Strike: Cinemas of Exhaustion”. Gorfinkel regularly writes criticism for Sight & Sound and other publications.

Kate Adams is an artist and activist. She initiates responsive and collaborative projects with people who have complex support needs and their families, carers and services, artists and galleries. Kate co-founded Project Artworks to explore an expanded conception of art that was and continues to be influenced by her son, Paul Colley. He does not use language to communicate but illuminates the barriers faced by people in a neurotypical world as well as the wonder of other ways of being.

Project Artworks collaborates with many individuals who have complex needs and their circles of support as well as cultural organisations nationally and internationally. The work embraces highly personalised studio practice, advocacy, support for families and carers, forums and public exhibitions that raise awareness and influence more neurodiverse representation in civic and cultural life. Current works include collaborations, co-commissions and exhibitions with De La Warr Pavilion, Tate Liverpool, Mk gallery, Museum of Contemporary Art and the Experimental Art Faculty UNSW, Sydney; and a major conference on Art, Rights and Representation to be held at the newly opened Mk Gallery on 20/21 November 2019.

Salomé Voegelin makes sound and writes about sound to access through words and ephemeral things the indivisible sphere of a connected world. As a researcher, she works at the forefront of the new knowledge economy established by sound studies and sound art, turning to the invisible and mobile dimension of art and the everyday to achieve new insights that can deliver novel answers to pressing issues in ecology, politics, education and social integration. Her most recent book The Political Possibility of Sound: Fragments of Listening, 2018, articulates a politics that includes creativity and invention and imagines transformation and collaboration as the basis of our living together. Voegelin is a Professor of Sound at the London College of Communication, UAL.

Sofia Victorino is the Daskalopoulos Director of Education and Public Programmes at Whitechapel Gallery, London, where she oversees artist residencies, commissions, community projects and public programmes, including performance and film. She was previously head of Education and Public Programmes at the Serralves Museum in Porto, Portugal (2002–2011). Her research is focused on art, performativity and social practice, and she has curated projects with a number of artists, including Mikhail Karikis (2018), Emanuel Almborg (2017), the collective Assemble (2017), Samson Kambalu (2016), Rivane Neuenschwander (2015), Luke Fowler and Mark Fell (2015), Peter Liversidge (2015), Bart Lodewijks (2014–2015), Francis Upritchard (2014), Fraser Muggeridge (2014), Heather and Ivan Morison (2013), Theaster Gates (2013) and Claire Pentecost (2013).

Tendai John Mutambu is Assistant Curator of Commissions and Public Programmes at Spike Island, Bristol. He is a regular contributor to Ocula Magazine and has contributed to several art journals and exhibition catalogues. Among his recent curatorial projects is WE ARE HERE, a series of five film programs and installations of artists’ moving image from the British Council and LUX collections that is touring internationally until 2022.

Beatrice Gibson makes films that are improvised and experimental in nature, exploring the pull between chaos and control in the process of their making. Drawing on cult figures from experimental music, literature and poetry – from Cornelius Cardew and Robert Ashley to Kathy Acker and Gertrude Stein – Gibson’s films are citational and participatory. Populated by friends and influences from within her immediate community, they often cite and incorporate co-creative and collaborative processes and ideas.

Cécile B. Evans examines the value of emotions in contemporary societies, and their rebellion as they come into contact with the power structures that directly impact our daily lives. Her videos, which combine live action and digital animation, use narrative to negotiate the possibility of many diverse realities within a common space.

Mikhail Karikis develops filmmaking strategies that undermine dominant frames of representation and employs listening as a form of activism. He works in sustained collaborations with individuals and communities located outside the context of contemporary art, often pushed into economic and socio-geographic fringes. This results in participatory film projects that highlight alternative modes of human existence, solidarity and action while nurturing dignity and tenderness.

Hetain Patel is interested in connecting marginalised identities with the mainstream in an effort to destabilise notions of authenticity and promote personal freedom. Often with an autobiographical starting point, he uses humour and the languages of popular culture to highlight familiarity within the exotic. He also works with photography, sculpture and performance.

Imran Perretta works across the moving-image, sound, performance and poetry. Perretta’s practice addresses biopower, marginality and the (de)construction of cultural histories. Underpinning his work are questions of alterity and neo-coloniality, meditating on the process of identity forming in a post-9/11 era characterized by austerity, state-sponsored Islamophobia and the War on Terror.

Rehana Zaman works predominantly with moving image to examine how social dynamics are produced and performed. Her work speaks to the entanglement of personal experience and social life, where intimacy is framed against the hostility of state legislation, surveillance and control.

The Film London Jarman Award recognises and supports artists working with moving image and celebrates the spirit of experimentation, imagination and innovation in the work of UK-based artist filmmakers. The Award is inspired by visionary filmmaker Derek Jarman.

The Award is unique within the industry in offering both financial assistance and the rare opportunity for winners to produce a new moving image artwork. The Award is presented in association with the Whitechapel Gallery.

Now in its twelfth year, the Award has built an enviable reputation for spotting rising stars of the UK art world. Previously shortlisted artists include Laure Prouvost, Elizabeth Price, Monster Chetwynd, Duncan Campbell, James Richards, Charlotte Prodger, Lawrence Abu Hamdan and Luke Fowler, all of whom went on to be shortlisted for or to win the Turner Prize.