Jarman Award touring screening programme 2024

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, STEPHEN (2023), 78′

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.

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.