Amira journeys to Bahia in Brazil to trace the slave routes in the woundedness of the water and of the land. Visiting sites/places of spiritual and cultural significance, Amira continues to peel the wounds left by colonisation in disparate contexts, while also instigating spaces for healing to happen.

© Lhola Amira. Courtesy of SMAC Gallery

A device designed to collect the sounds produced by different human and non-human organisms on the banks of the Bobonaza River in Ecuador´s Amazon rainforest, activates the symbolic inversion of the celebrated voyage in Werner Herzog’s film Fitzcarraldo (1982), where —in the depths of the Amazon jungle— the protagonist attempts to enchant the natives by playing the arias from the opera Caruso on his gramophone. For Grabador Fantasma, a local dugout canoe was built to transport a phantasmagorical recording device —which itself is run by solar power— recording echoes of a post-carbon journey.

Courtesy Adrián Balseca in collaboration with Kara Solar Foundation

Artist Meriem Bennani and filmmaker Orian Barki’s 2 Lizards is an eight-episode series of videos posted on Instagram in the time of coronavirus, featuring a pair of computer-generated lizards contemplating and navigating life and self-isolation in New York City.

Using 3D animation and real footage, the series poignantly captures the range of emotions experienced during lockdown, from uncertainty and anxiety to dreamlike detachment and empathy.

Through the interactions of the characters we travel through the current times and explore questions of socio-political significance with a sense of lightness and humour.

Copyright Meriem Bennani & Orian Barki; courtesy of the artists and C L E A R I N G, New York / Brussels.

Music by COQUETA (episode 2), Flavien Berger (episode 3, 4 and 8), Asma Maroof (episode 5), Sienna Miles Fekete and Color Plus (episode 6) and Morris (episode 7).

Swell the absorption of one energy transmuted into a multitude of new energies. Swell of the ocean, swell of the belly, swell of your heart. We swell for many reasons one of which is the first step in healing. An injury alerts our body to rush to the source and flood the affected area. The swell of a pregnant belly a completely different form of swell to flood nutrients to new life. The change of tides internally. A marking of time through gestation. A small travelling universe within the mother. The sphere of time as the mother lays in the womb of the ocean her baby lays in the ocean of her womb. Echoing the never-ending cycle of time, speaking to the portals we may create when we acknowledge what has been before, what is and what is coming may all move rhythmically together.

This work aims to explore how we mark time in such a clinical way. The linear and absolute view of time creates finite limitations. It also creates distance between the future and the past which can be weaponised an in a way create erasure. If we look at time as its own element, then Time is may be interacted with, just as any other life force. The gestation of an entirely new life force to me seems wildly mind blowing and yet we have come to see everything on earth as normal. This idea of time suspended, reversed, sped up is so that we truly witness this moment. Perhaps if you could suspend your ideas of time for a moment and imagine time as its own force, where and when in the ocean of your life would you swim to, now knowing that all directions are not only connected but possible?

Copyright and courtesy, Hanna Brontë

Qu’un Sang Impur began as a loose remake of Jean Genet’s “Un Chant d’Amour” (1950), a homoerotic love story between inmates in a prison, under the yearning watch of a sadistic prison guard. In Curnier Jardin’s film, shiny young male bodies are replaced with post-menopausal women, who celebrate their erotic power after shedding the patriarchal construct which denotes them as ‘of the market' (as author Virginie Despentes would say). Having escaped the endless reproductive loop, the artist ascribes a special power to this stage in a woman’s life, uncoupled from being an object of desire. In their moment of need, they bleed again.

Courtesy the artist and Ellen de Bruijne Projects

Made during confinement, IN MY ROOM plunges us into the poignant story of a woman at the twilight of her life, through recordings of the director’s deceased grandmother. Living rooms become stages where life is performed. Windows become portals to the lives of others.

Directed by Mati Diop
Scored by Dean Blunt
© Miu Miu Woman Tales

In this work, Bin Fahad finds himself in a sacred place and almost by chance, from a privileged perspective, he stops to observe what happens beyond a luminescent partition placed to contain and give order to the visitors. The result is a magical moment which the artist recordswith his mobile phone. Moments reported in this vibrant installation show hundreds of hands, faces, noses and gestures crowd, crawl and crush against this wall that has almost become the materialisation of the spirit. Everyone tries, after a long journey, to get in touch with Him. Each immersed in himself in search of his own answer, animated only by his own questions. All together with the load of gestures and humanity that make this moment universal. (Hands in search of God in which the visitor can identify a journey at the same time abstract and concrete towards the divine.

Courtesy the artist and Athr Gallery, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia

Filmed on location in Harlem, USA and in Claude Monet’s historic gardens in Giverny, France, Giverny I (NÉGRESSE IMPÉRIALE) is a multi-textured cinematic poem that meditates on the safety and bodily autonomy of Black women.

Filmmaker Ja’Tovia Gary unleashes an arsenal of techniques and materials including direct animation on archival 16mm film, woman on the street interviews, and montage editing techniques to explore the creative virtuosity of Black femme performance figures while interrogating the histories of those bodies as spaces of forced labor and commodified production.

Single-channel video, stereo sound, HD and SD video footage, 1920 × 1080, 16:9 aspect ratio, 6 minutes (looped), color/black & white.

Directed, edited and animated by Ja’Tovia Gary.

© Ja’Tovia Gary. Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York

BLACK PUSSY is a dystopian satire created with video archives sourced via the cyberspace. Throughout the videos, BLACK PUSSY explores the three main Black female archetypes, and the ways in which the media utilize those images to control the narratives of Black women.

Courtesy of the artist

Filmed in 16mm just after the lockdown caused by COVID-19, Flowers blooming in our throats is an intimate, poetic portrait of the fragile balances that govern everyday life in a domestic setting. The artist films a group of her friends in their own homes, performing various small actions in accordance with her instructions. Giolo chooses to walk a shifting line where gestures remain symbolically ambiguous, expressing a kind of violence that is not immediately recognizable.

Text by Leonardo Bigazzi
Courtesy the artist, elephy, Fondazione In Between Art Film

The Critical Dictionary of Southeast Asia (CDOSEA), begins with a question: what constitutes the unity of Southeast Asia — a region never unified by language, religion or political power?

CDOSEA proceeds by proposing 26 terms — one for each letter of the English / Latin alphabet. each term is a concept, a motif, or a biography, and together they are threads weaving together a torn and tattered tapestry of Southeast Asia.

The dictionary has, since its inception in 2012, generated a number of filmic, theatrical and installation works for Ho Tzu Nyen: Ten Thousand Tigers (2014), 2 or 3 Tigers (2015), The Nameless (2015), The Name (2015), Timelines (2017), One or Several Tigers (2017).

CDOSEA is a platform facilitating ongoing research, a matrix for generating future projects and an oracular montage machine.

Courtesy of the Artist and Edouard Malingue Gallery

An animation made up of emojis with the duration of a single exhalation, blown directly at the microphone. The animation was first made in the confines of quarantine, presenting constant movement while in a situation of immobility.

Courtesy of the artist

In the work Blue Room (Snake River Correctional Institution)E.B. Itso addresses the solitary confinement that prisoners in the US undergo, spending 23 hours and 20 minutes a day in their windowless, artificially lit cells.

At Snake River Correctional Institution in Oregon the isolated inmates are allowed and encouraged to spend their daily 40 minutes outside the cell in a space called the Blue Room. The inmate gets to sit alone on a bench surrounded by living plants in a room with light blue walls. A video projector casts footage, exposing the prisoner to nature and wildlife; rainforests, seascapes, reefs, deserts, mountains, tropical beaches, rivers, and roaring forest fires. 40 minutes of video therapy and a chimerical connection to the natural world outside.

Courtesy E.B. Itso and Gallery Nicolai Wallner

A rapper writes his new song, talking about his night out in the center of Athens. He sits in the kitchen of his apartment, where we see a mosaic floor and some colorful tiles on the wall. At night, a car wash transforms into a kickboxing studio, where the employees practice in pairs – yet all alone. The floor is mosaic and there are colorful tiles on the wall.

‘’I created a moving image work inspired by the people I encountered during the quarantine – my friend, and my trainer. The common axis is formed by the mosaic floor, the tiles, and also our personal relationship.’’

© Evi Kalogiropoulou. Courtesy of the artist and The Breeder, Athens

The project was developed with the support of the ENTER program created by Onassis Foundation

Bengu Karaduman’s work deals with the concerns, and taking up issues of the fragility of being knowledge laborers at the mercy of a heavy-handed system, while at the same time questioning and posing possibilities towards a modified system which incorporates technological reformations. In relationship to one another, these two concerns spell out the most urgent issues of the day, especially in re-imagining a just and ethical labor system.

Text excerpt from ‘Closing The Loop’ by Zeynep Öz

Courtesy of the artist and Martch Art Project, Istanbul
Sound – Periklis Liakakis

During the first lockdown, I started a video diary, filming from my own window in St. Petersburg. Through the eye of my camera, the deserted landscape looked like an eerie dream. I got to wondering what other people across the planet were dreaming about. So I took to collecting dreams via social media. As I corresponded with strangers, I increasingly felt the community inspired by our shared isolation. The process turned into a game: the dark caves of other people’s dreams joined into an intricate labyrinth, and the more dreams I had, the more unexpected links I found. The polyphonic network of fears, memories, and hopes animated my landscape.

Black Corporeal (Between This Air) is a critical examination on the relationship between materiality, and the black psyche. Exploring the idea that our ability to breathe - an act that is continuously challenged by everything from air pollution, stress and anxiety and societal prejudice - is more than our lungs’ ability to take in air, but a reflection of the way we live individually and together. Black Corporeal (This Air) engages with both the physical and metaphysical aspects of breathing and asks if we can reposition ourselves through the extrinsic, the creation of black structures and realities that allow us to breathe, freely.

Courtesy of the Artist ©Studioknxx

In 2020, Image de Ville and PERU (Paris) appealed to filmmakers to collect short films capable of reflecting the power and scope of the hospitality that some of our contemporaries offer to migrants today. This is the contribution by filmmaker Isaki Lacuesta.

Courtesy of the artist

In Yong Xiang Li’s ​I’m not in love (how to feed on humans),​ the artist restores the tired motif of the vampire, injecting it with a sense of queer warmth. In this freakish and playful narrative-film-cum-music video, a 386-year-old Asian vampire—​Vampy—​ struts about town tending to his three lovers, or symbionts.​

Courtesy Artist and Antenna Space

Moléculas relates a highly personal narrative that is part biographical, part fantastical reality. The work explores fundamental questions about family, loss, separation, and contemporary politics, as well as the ways in which memories acutely and even painfully live on, long after events have passed. Made using 3D animation, Olivares’s touching video is equally sensitive in its technical detail. Rendered in a muted palette, the work is set in an interior that suggests both analyst’s office and modernist living room. The work visually evokes the delicate landscape of the mind, which Olivares ultimately sees as universal to our collective experiences, particularly of loss and death.

Courtesy of the artist

Taking Care (Love Letter to Fellow Art Work) is a short film in which the artist (face unseen) speaks lovingly to an unknown work of art. Installed in close proximity to an artwork, by Laure or another artist, the video acknowledges Prouvost's position as an artist in a humorous and tender style.

This film relates to Laure's 2010 piece, “I Need to Take Care of My Conceptual Grandad” in which Laure attempts to massage body lotion into a Jonathan Latham monograph (Prouvost worked as an assistant for Latham for several years) in an act that is suggestive of ideas related to artistic influence and inheritance, and is both caring and destructive.

© Laure Prouvost; Courtesy Lisson Gallery.

Recorded by an overhead camera, the artist lays comfortably with the music on, surrounded by an orb of care products and cosmetics. She then picks one bottle and drinks the liquid, and moves onto the next one…it goes on until all the bottles are all empty…

What is represented in Ma Qiusha’s act seems to be a mixture of both an explicit arousal and an implicit rebellion of the consumption of the female body. In other words, the complexity lies not simply Ma Qiusha’s embodied exploration with her body and the beauty products, but rather the strong potentiality in emancipating herself from the former. Her act of eating, that of ceaselessly consuming the beauty products surrounding her, metaphorically points to the endless cycle that everyone suffocates in the context of commercial culture. It is precisely the site of the female’s body, where the beauty products are given with commercial and functional roles, that becomes the agency of instrument through which Ma Qiusha's subtle disguise takes place.

Khtobtogone is the intimate portrait of Zine, a 20 year old man in a quest of becoming the best version of himself, before asking for his girlfriend’s hand. Khtobtogone depicts his daily life, love story and friendships as well as emotional roller-coasters, torments and inner demons he has to continuously manage in order to regain self-confidence, self-love and self-esteem.

Khtobtogone is inspired by real-life stories and words of Ahmed Ra’ad Al Hamid and Brian Chiappeta.

Commissioned by CNAP (Centre Natonall des Arts Plastque) as part of a partnership with Triangle France – Astérides

Courtesy the artist and Crèvecœur

Cul-de-Sac (2019) is a drone-shot video, moving up, down and high above the suburban street where Sahib grew up in Southall, West London. The field of view is in continual and shifting dialogue with a disorientating soundtrack of sleep-talking and arguments, snippets of Sahib’s father playing the flute and the ambient thrum of a nightclub which emerges and gradually distorts. The film functions as an exploration of the plurality of self, the notion of home and the idea of different lives converging.

Courtesy of the artist and Southard Reid, London

car, road, mountain depicts a number of mountainous regions: a road through the mountains, various passes and lakes. In addition, we see footage from satellite imagery, airstrikes and battle scenes. The film consists of found footage from various sources, among them tourism campaigns and newscasts, set to a soundtrack including Turkish newscasts. Short descriptive texts are superimposed on the images. While they begin as apparently factual statements (“We see a road. We see a mountain.”), their combination with the images begins to make us question what we see and, more importantly, what it means, and in the process the imagery of at times pastoral landscapes gains an ominous association.

Courtesy the artist and Esther Schipper, Berlin

In Théâtrophone, a popular call-in request show for classical music on Switzerland’s national cultural radio station is the starting point for a series of short episodic melodramas visualizing an arsenal of fictional characters that could be imagined behind the distant, yet near, medialised voices of the telephone and radio. Each episode links one of the characters’ personal music requests to a fleetingly filmed play scene from the idiosyncratically Swiss milieus of the culturally educated middle class. Each of these roles is played by the artists themselves, all telephone calls were held and broadcast in spring and summer of 2020, thus transferring the fiction back into the real broadcasting space.

Courtesy Rico Scagliola & Michael Meier

The cross fade is a classica cinematic code for transiting smoothly from one space to another using the ellipse to condense ‘useless’ narrative time. Images from one shot overlap with images from the next, often resulting in unique and surprising compositions. Here, the detective Marc McPhearson from Otto Preminger’s film Laura (1942) remains stuck in a transition which stretches out beyond the overlapping composition. The video expands the notion of condensed time, by being doubly chained in an eternal transition.

Courtesy the artist and Marfa Gallery