Film London Jarman Award Weekend 2021 - Sunday

hello welcome and good afternoon on this sunday of the german white chapel weekend and this is our 14th edition and we're really looking forward to presenting some work for you this afternoon i'm maggie ellis i'm head of the film london artist moving image network otherwise known as flamin for simplicity and with me here is greta hewson who's a colleague and also works with flamin and she production coordinates on quite a lot of our programmes but is specifically involved with bringing you all the german activities which go on throughout the year now the german award is very special to us it was set up in 2008 we launched it then in honour of the legacy of british avant-garde filmmaker artist gardener provocateur many other things um and the importance of his impact on contemporary practice our intention at film london is to shine a light on filmmakers who are working today and like german resist any sort of conventional uh definition in their work now over the years we've worked with some fabulous filmmakers not only for the german award but across but across all our other schemes however we're concentrating on the german award today and i'd like to give you the short list of artists some of you who were here with us yesterday will have heard what i've said already but just bear with me um so the six shortlisted artists are in alphabet georgina star guy oliver yasmina sivitz larry achieve and sophia almeria and some of you saw three of the artists yesterday but first this afternoon um you will hear from larry achiangpong who is presenting two works relic three and expulsion and after the films they'll be in conversation with the writer charlotte johnson a little bit about um um larry before we kick off um larry's solo and collaborative practice embraces our visual visual archives live performance and sound he explores class popular culture cross-cultural identity and examines his communal and personal heritage i'm sure i'll be talking about that in a lot more detail he's exhibited and performed and this is only a few of the places he's he's worked in tate modern venice biennale somerset house liverpool biennale but very importantly he's got his first major solo show in march 2022 at turner contemporary and he said to me that this is easily his most ambitious work to date so you must go down there and see it sorry as an ambulance going past um a little bit about charlotte johnson she's a british sri lankan writer who's based in london she's written extensively on contemporary art for many publications and i'll only mention a few the guardian l freeze um british journal of photography amongst many others she's the author of two books on contemporary photography and presenter this is this sounds wonderful of the dior top the dior talks podcast series the female gays then we'll have a break after um after larry and charlotte and we'll come back at 3 30 to hear adam faramawi and at five o'clock to um for a georgina star um presentation and finally i'd just like like to say thanks to all the people who are involved with the german award without whom it just wouldn't exist and first of all i'd like to say a big thank you to all the artists for their fantastic contribution to the programme and without you we wouldn't be here we've got great partners in the white chapel gallery and i particularly like to mention ivona blasvik the director jane and richard from the curatorial side and sam and ralph for all their technical support and pulling this together we've got matchbox cine we've got lee from matchbox cine and one two one captions who've had um worked very hard on making the whole program captioned so thank you to them and last but certainly not least um the arts council england who've been support continuing support for the work we do and without whom we couldn't do any of this and the biggest thing i suppose in my working life is working with flaming team rose and greta and duncan who make my life very nice and very straightforward and without whom i couldn't be here doing this so over to greta and thank you to film london and the flaming team thank you thank you maggie um before we go into the presentation i just wanted to mention a couple of kind of housekeeping points um and as maggie said we're really thrilled that all of the presentations this afternoon will have captions available um for the first um presentation from lariat champong the two works will have captions that will just appear um as the films play and uh for the in conversation portion if you do want captions for that you can toggle them on and off using the subtitles closed captions button at the bottom right hand side of your screen and as maggie says after i finished speaking we'll go straight into larry's presentation and then at the end we'll go straight into a break and we really encourage you to use this break to explore the works by the shortlisted artists that are available on the white chapel gallery website at the moment if you're watching from the white chapel gallery website all you need to do is scroll down and you'll be able to see the works there and if you're watching from youtube you'll need to click over to the whitechapel gallery website find the jam and award program on the events page and then click the button that says launch weekend hub page and you'll find the works by the shortlisted artists there um all of those works have captions that you can toggle on and off apart from georgina star's film 10 um which doesn't have captions because it doesn't feature any dialogue um and then we'd love to welcome you back at 3 30 p.m for um the presentation from adham faramawi and they've invited the poet misha ramayana to read um some new writing and then they'll be in conversation with the curator costa stasinopoulos um so thanks so much for joining us and here is lariat champong's film relic 3. [Music] [Music] kwame means so many jobs we call him this because he do so many jobs he traveled this land same time as hezu but he somehow find work lots just like that he said he won't for take all the money queen and empire take from us and return it home i don't think he'll make it back home i worry about him his body won't go on forever doing this work back to back and he no rest you know it's real food only this oily fish and cheap business he said if he spent money to make home food then he did take home less money [Music] he's talking deep like tuffy every day is a working day the factory took so many in those of us that migrated here they know we need their money and that no one else will do the type of work they are asking to be done it is dangerous you read in the papers that this country goes crazy over health and safety i heard that the last wave of migrant workers were fired after one of them tied in the plastics parking machine you wouldn't have heard about it in the paper because an immigrant's life has no value replaceable desperate to work expandable untraceable [Music] project said the poor food probably couldn't read english and trapped himself in there bruto has no heart for the dead nor does he have a brain at the best of times that machine required two people to operate it deep down everyone knows this nameless man was murdered we are just too afraid to admit it [Music] this place isn't just full of immigrants they have some of their own working here as well we call them poor english [Music] they seem to be somewhere in the middle where rank is concerned not good enough to sit at the table with the important whites yet they keep themselves away from us the boss says it's better this way because fights are always happening amongst you lot or maybe the boss knows that if we all got him he wouldn't be able to control us the way he does one of the poor english does come to talk to us from time to time [Music] his name is tom [Music] sometimes he makes me laugh and sometimes his ignorance makes me want to strangle the kid [Music] i remember the first time he introduced himself to me and kojo when he proclaimed to love rice and pee and that you lots are all right but i don't get unwell with the pakis and they say the best education in the world is here was yeah stupid full [Music] 12 hour shifts half our lunch and no other breaks the bus says we are not allowed to leave the premises when we have lunch [Music] project says it makes no sense to be outside in a way and that we don't want to be working targets for immigration to come and chuck us into the advance to think this is the freedom we desperately travel both london sea to attain [Music] to become a tax avoidable workforce paid less than speed [Music] no benefit no pension even the poor whites have access to this yet we are rewarded with a speed when we walk the street at daytime don't ask me what's in store for us at night [Music] i don't think our last year i saw something very bad the other day [Music] i caught the bus propositioning in his office when i was on break [Music] if you are not nice to me you may not have a job here after all as she ushered her to sit on his lap [Music] i heard this happened a lot before i got here as much as i disliked the boss god concert was what i thought of these stories all of a sudden the hearsay falls into place and i think about tom his kinky hair his familiar look and the realization that he's neither fights nor black [Music] [Music] the work he for do was spoken about like legend [Music] 16 hour shifts across three jobs and no rest [Music] he said he won't for take the money home but now he walk away with nothing for the take his life guami mesa [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] i'd usually travel down west as a tag along with mates to see the bright lights and signs on billboards in trafalgar square we went window shopping dreaming up on things we couldn't afford or even need i seem to fantasize being a possession of you'd come across these rich types then mountains of harrods bags and shiny watches nothing like bethnal green which seemed slow and sleepy by comparison [Music] yet when i traveled to west with mum and sometimes with my sis and [Music] the fast pace of consumers transitioning from here foreign sometimes mum will take us to the key jobs in the silver blue banged out 81 metro [Music] choking its way from one job to the next [Music] other times we take public transport simply to keep costs to a minimum on these journeys we'd witness the shift work from our brethren and sister [Music] the faces of manual labor hidden from the white color types laying tracks eradicating holes cleansing streets shipping parcels raising skyscrapers [Music] the underclass not quite silent but culver in our function [Music] those of us usually invisible in the daylight hour begin the expulsion [Music] we bleach mop the floors your soil tomorrow we will wipe the boardroom tables in which you dictate our future spray polish monitors minus the stocks and shares we dust away the sins lingering on your keyboards we vanish the daily grind you leave on windows [Music] we empty the secrets from your trash without a trace we sanctified the environment which you'll see tomorrow we the people of the twilight moving steps parallel to yours your mourning knows nothing of what our night sees we cleaned across corporate spaces offices of cigar smoking golf clubs swinging moguls who rule your screen time one summer london was burning and the next big brother was taking over the house i wondered what it would feel like to live one day when you didn't have to worry if the pay-as-you-go electric meter would pull through a cold winter's night security watched us from behind the fourth wall like props across varied screens their monitors playing back the same frames every night input pin code switch lights gather cleaning again sweep wash rinse wipe buff [Music] and repeat onto the next space the monotony of this existence melted my brain to distract ourselves us as kids would pass the time with real-life mario karts with which air races when our work was done i hated work i hated work i was always dreaming of what i could be doing instead pulling out fatalities with liu kang and mortal kombat 2. i fantasized about being one of the it boys at school the jack the lead types with their neatly pressed ben shermans or ralph lorenz fingers decorated with sovereigns a fresh reebok classics on their feet their mums weighing at home with a hot plate knowing that their dads would come home soon season tickets in hand to go and watch the west ham game on the weekends [Music] holidays in my orca but that was never going to be my family's reality which was instead lower than the white working classes that i had witnessed the words mum would speak from time to time were both blessing and the curse they hum in my ear to this day if you don't want to stay here then you better make sure you excel there is no plan b books are your best friends [Music] so so [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] hey charlotte nice to see you can't think of many better ways actually to spend the sunday afternoon especially this kind of dreary me kind of day than spending some time with you and spending some time with your films actually um and i'm always i'm still trying to process them like watching two back to back is quite it's quite full on i feel like you need the space and time around each of your films to kind of fully process everything that's that's happening there but it's a really interesting choice of two films to see um in terms of like you know for people that might be experiencing your work like this the first time because i think they represent two quite distinct approaches and you know both aesthetically and in terms of like um you know one having a more i guess that sort of low-fi documentaries type and the other one inspired a lot by you know sci-fi and gleaming aesthetics and quite quite different but both of them also um contain all those themes that you're constantly returning to you know around legacy around race class um identity the importance of like witnessing and testimony which is like always like ever present in your work um and you know i think one of the things that makes your work so powerful and resonate so deeply for me is this constant um push-pull kind of about them that that you move in between past and future but you're kind of gripping us so firmly in the in the present you know it kind of has us around around our neck um you know you move between fantasy and reality between you know documentary and sort of narrative like um type um storytelling i guess um there's just there's just so so much in there um for me and i really like to hear a bit more specifically about these two films that we've just seen you know from your point of view so the first one we saw was relic 3 which it's part of a much bigger thing isn't it um do you wanna tell us a bit a little bit about that work and you know how how you came to make it and i mean this is actually confusingly it's the fourth it is indeed yes yes relic 3 is is it's it's the fourth film in the series um interestingly it was it was kind of shocked but also produced back to back at the same time as uh relic 2 which is the the third film in the series and um within this this within the work uh audibly you're hearing uh a vocal testimony um how this kind of connects to the larger universe of relic trevor it's a speculative project it's set up a point in future uh that the future an unnamed point in the future um in which uh nationalism across uh the west the global west has um kind of like uh manifested so you know like post brexit and trump uh to the point where these places have become relics of themselves and [Music] unspecified time uh additionally the the african union as a result of a passport program that has been in gestation for years which allows africans to travel around the whole continent with no issue with visa this has resulted in [Music] a point in time of prosperity of harmony and independence and so how the films kind of you know fit into this point in time of relic traveler is um the viewer is watching the other journeys of uh these people who are called relic travelers who essentially are sent outside of the au to pick up vocal testimonies that have been left at any point in history and time uh by people who've experienced aspects of oppression uh in in this case with relic free uh the focus is on that of a um a west african elder who is um detailing her own experiences of working within a factory working in in london the the experience of being a uh uh an immigrant and um you know themes of sexual abuse or even brought a conversation within that as well it's quite a it's quite a harrowing tell and um and and like i said visually the the stories is following um the the experiences of the other relic travelers they're that they're picking up uh information or um should i say exploring these these sites so you know for me the idea was to kind of like i guess flip the the the the approach to you know exploration because i think historically speaking you know with colonialism in mind it's it's something that is usually for the other way around from a western you know kind of uh you know perspective so you know there are points where there is imagery actually that is kind of you know generated to try to meet with the the the the haunting uh vibes within the you know the the vocal testimony which is you know done on purpose um but yeah i guess yeah i'll leave it with that in terms of a lot i mean yeah there's so much with the iceberg and it's part of i mean i think in terms of you because you know there's so much talk on you you're about as multi-disciplinary as it comes you know like i mean you've got the flag actually from this from the relic travelers the travellers um serious the flag in the background there and people might remember it from you know you flew it on top of some of that house and loads of other places since um but it it really i think is in terms of your filmmaking it represents obviously it comes as a part of like many other things you know you you performance around this you've there's music there's um even the way that you present these films in space which was another question i had for you in terms of like your filmmaking because that seems to be such a it's actually quite unusual to see experience your films like this online just on a screen um you know they're usually big you have some multi-channel work you've had you've had um you know you usually build create a whole environment around them how does that in relation to the particular themes of like the rabbit relic travelers um you know the relic films um which is probably one of your most like recognizable works now at this point like it's really been like it's kind of one of the core parts of your you know one of the key works of your practice so far um how do you how do you approach um your filmmaking in terms of presenting it like a film like this and how does that relate to the the themes within the work so we said it's so much to do with yeah the ideas of of relics and archive and sort of like how does the physical experience of how important is it because i feel like you're you're so it doesn't let you go your films like it they do really do you know immersive is kind of an overused word but i mean how do you do you think no no i i really appreciate that question i don't think i've been asked that question that way about you know filmmaking before and and um just as you were kind of like you know going through the motions of that i it made me think a lot about um you know sculpture of building you know and and i i definitely think that has i mean yeah i did i did an m.a a slide

which i finished in in 2008 but even at that point in time when i was you know even studying before even graduating i was it was quite frustrated with um i guess just the understanding of what sculpture is or what it could be and already at that point in time i was experimenting a lot with sound i wasn't showing the the audio works i was making so much maybe a couple of things here or there but i was just working it it was weird i had to it was like i was in two studios when i went home there was a there was the home studio the you know the other bedroom studio and then when i got into the uh the the you know and to the faculty there was something else that was being built but the reason why i'm saying that is because unbeknownst to me i was working and building elements to do with soundtracking to do with um the approach to prose or or or poetry you know kind of like first person perspectives um in in writing i i was kind of playing around with some of these things bridging some of these things together even at that point in time i hadn't really thought about about film necessarily as uh as a as a medium to to use i was massively like a fan of cinema i loved cinema i love films was already building up like a collection of dvds like inspired loads by my mom and and her interest in in in cinema um but i think you know where that became a thing for me to actually build and and the process the answer answering of your questions to you know how the process kind of takes place for me it's really just being aware of the fact that it can you can really involve people and you can you know not just at the point of when the the work is done and you think about how that can be played but this actual process of of of conversating with people of bringing people along uh on on the journey uh the division um uh working together to build that vision um because you know with all of these these films even even sunday's best which you know this 2016 film was shot before the relic traveler films is it's the last film that i've that i kind of like did all the camera work and so many of the other things myself but i was still collaborating i was collaborating with my mother you know and without without her kind of like devotion to the the subject that we're talking about which is you know faith but then also her devotion to the idea although you know she had trust in me you know i was gonna do or write about um that just couldn't that couldn't happen so i think you know for me what i've really been aware of along the way is the the work doesn't become possible without without working with with with other people um which i enjoy doing i love you know having conversations with people i love uh listening to different perspectives to you know an idea or or a situation you know with relic 2 for example that that the script for that was co-written by uh ada mutro who who have collaborative uh collaborated with you know along the years we've we've also recently collaborated on um a new film really ambitious uh piece which you know will be unveiled next year um and it's really yeah it's it's it's that idea of of of journeying with with people and learning along the way and building upon you know these seeds of of ideas and stories and whatnot and and it's very sculptural it's very physical whether we think about it from like the most basic sense of of the word of like even like you know prop design or what have you you know the the relic traveler outfit which is very important iconic to you know the other the series so there's yeah there's there's a lot of play but i think it's you know collaboration is very for me you know central and within all of it although like that you know again even to this day there's so much that i still like to you know do myself i still like to compose the other soundtrack i love to work with the camera but again you know um working with with with people um it it just opens up for me my you know my horizons as to how um i can tell these stories you know differently and it feels like you know that's it's reflected in the work itself and the themes you're talking about it's about you know the individual and the collective experience and how we can join those back up you know in a way that history hasn't allowed them to be joined up or has kind of obliterated those those bloodlines or obliterated those connections and you kind of you know you see that physically in the world you experience it when you experience in space but even in your making your collaborative process you know you're constantly interested in these shifting all you know multiplicitous kind of points of view like in expulsion obviously we have those bits where you hear the voice and you that's something you use sometimes when the boys kind of split i mean there's probably a technical word for that i don't know what you call that effect but you know you're actually literally um shifting and and making that like clear that there's different perspectives and different voices you know you've worked as amazing narrators each of your films has this very distinctive quality you know thanks to the narrators that you've brought in as well and the way and i know that that's very important to you and you've really appreciated the kind of things that various narrators that you've even brought in have brought to the the pros to the script as well um so yeah i mean it's it's yeah your way of working is just it's just so fascinating and i mean i know last time you were you've been shortlisted for this award before right as well um collaboratively with david blandy yeah yeah so this is your first but again you know that that collaboration as well um which was which was really also really incredible but just shows like yeah how how how consistent you've been i guess in that kind of approach to collaboration so thinking about the expulsion then um which again i guess the i guess the theme that joins these very strongly is the idea of like labor of like again you know physical labor and the unseen you know because in a way what's so interesting about these um films as well is the kind of disconnect and the dissonance between the image and the narration and that like you see you want you you're imagining two things at once you know it's kind of again so the way you play with the way you play with time and i think some of the inspirations that you know you draw from um and the ideas around agency that definitely um you know it plays into that that the way that you use image and sound or image and you know voice um so so labor so it's come back to that and this this well both these films really were kind of eerily prescient as well um and and as was your the strata film that was that was shot in a you know an abandoned supermarket before the pandemic which is just crazy now like you know but that would become such a like you know an image that was sort of pricked the public consciousness afterwards um but you were already like there with it and these works as well you know just as to the cleaning of sanitation and who who is a key worker you know and who's putting their you know what are the dangerous jobs you talk about dangerous labor and relic three and now we see a different you know not a job that's thought of as dangerous but it really is like it's um you know people that that i'm that implicit threat i guess that's that's present in both these works so what about the expulsion like how did that because again all your works are personal to an extent you know there's autobiographical elements you even have your family members in some of them um but this one is quite really quite close to the bone for you more yeah you know it is and um you know when you were you're talking about me kind of like you know telling telling stories with with the work actually it reminded me of um a conversation i had with my mum years ago probably i don't know i was probably 16 or something and you know at that point in time i um i was just finishing my juice gcses and made the decision to i guess do the equivalent of like her kind of like art foundation i remember her saying i didn't get it at the time but she was like you know one day you will tell my story like she said it like in a really you know like matter-of-fact way and like my mom she just has a way of she has a connection with with with divination i believe in in a way that she can tell you know when when certain things are gonna happen and um they don't always reveal themselves entirely at the point in time but i didn't get it but like i think you know when i think about a film like that the expulsion especially uh and and that point in time where she where she said those words um she spoke through to power and it manifested in you know essentially a story that of course concerns me concerns her concerns my siblings you know relationship of of you know of of uh you know labor uh undocumented labor um that the migrant experience um how that also connects with uh the experience of of the diaspora and so on and back again and um i'd wanted to i'd wanted to make this film for a while but i just i i guess i didn't have like the kind of the language or the understanding to be able to talk about things i guess from from my perspective because it's my voice this that particular film um where i'm i'm i'm talking a lot about this weird um pensiveness of on one end kind of like being you know envious of not being able to like afford certain things within the environment of like the west end where we travel into but then also you know the lamentation of of of of the monotony of of cleaning just going to this these same places again and again and again either very late at night or very early in the morning you know uh times at which you don't see many people um and your body isn't at its point where for me anyway not at this point where you know i want to do much but but we had to because we had to you know to survive really um so you know the way that i thought about making this film was actually thinking about as a horror film i was thinking a lot about you know the likes of uh john carpenter's thinking a lot about which i think with my work kind of manifests a bit would be on the substrata but i was thinking about the um uh the michael myers or the shape character that is that is known the idea of theo the boogeyman um and the reason why that was important was because with regards to race with regards to racism that the experiences that i'd had of when people would talk about you know people that i knew people who are white especially who talk about their experiences of coming across you know like black shadows which you know tended to be from their descriptions that of like black people you know that that the feeling for me was as if you know we were we were things you know and and i wanted to i guess convey convey the the the slowness of of the feeling of that pain so you know that there's that corridor kind of like sequence where you have uh the auntie with the the the mop bucket standing like you know in in in the backdrop and you know the lights and so on and you know that's done very much on on purpose but to try to convey this this uh this other kind of like bodily uh you know experience if you will so yeah you know there's a lot going on in that work it's very heavy i think like you said there's more of like almost in some respects of documentative approach with it there's a lot there's there's a lot of visual noise in in the film um initially when i was making the theme i was like oh gosh like when i try and find a way to get rid of it and i did work with deep noising but then actually i realized you know what it's it's about the grit it's about the filth it's about that that that reality so that just it just stayed in there um and uh yeah yes uh there's there's quite a um it's quite a ride in terms of calling upon these memories of of of doing that that kind of work at that that point in time i think for me is definitely in terms of my upbringing it's a way of you know some people in my family where we deal with trauma in a way where we perhaps we yeah we try to kind of like laugh back up things sometimes but a lot of it actually isn't funny you know what i mean yeah so um for me it yeah it is my kind of uh way of kind of like mentally and emotionally dealing with that through through the telling of of the story i mean it's incredibly tense and you know the fact that you make the items on the desk even you know the threat of them falling and what you know what might happen and just like but it is there is almost humor in it that is so that this thing or this person performing this job could be seen as a threat you know or could be hawked out you know to use word that you've described the experience of being in space um you know as a black person to be to be hawked out in that space and treated as a thing which you follow up you know very strongly and beyond the substrata as well and i think you can see the foundations of that in this work with the way that you you shoot it and you don't ever see really a full body you know it's always like um the laboring parts of the body or just like fragments you know that disembodiment like that kind of cutting up of the body itself and not being seen as a as a whole um but yeah almost almost humor in that that just how pregnant that atmosphere is um i hadn't i hadn't thought about the horror film link like i didn't realize that but that's that's also because you know there's there's that happiness to john carpenter's films as well where it's almost it is absurd and and i guess again it's like we don't know we don't know who the narrator is necessarily you know now we know you know you know about the work we know that it's you and it's it's it is you you know narrating that experience but again it's that um i guess that kind of uneasiness between between image and what's being recounted and stuff what was also really um strong for me in that film is where you um recount about um the the way that you used fantasy and play and like creativity actually as a way of dealing with the monotony as a way of dealing with the um what you said the mind melting monotony that you described and like well also the i love the the people of twilight as well i love that where you flip that you know as like that sounds like something that's so something straight out of like you know sci-fi but you kind of flip it in this way of like this is actually real real life and um but yeah so do you think that um in a way your these experiences have because i i have i have a kind of feeling that the most sort of honest and you've talked about urgency you know about working work because it's urgent that actually that kind of fantasy that play that kind of creativity imagination is the urgent element to your work and the urgent element to life to like when you grow up and these kind of with these kind of experiences which you know i can i can really identify with that um that that is how you deal with um with this monotony i'm not only but the pain the pain of that mother and like why you're there like why you have to why me you know why do i have to and you know it made me it also made me smile the sort of the sherman and ralph lauren and the breed box you know because it's such a you know it's said in such a straight way but you know we know we're talking from a child's like more naive perspective is not what we say now but i could completely remember that with that kind of feeling and that you know that longing that wishing to be someone else or to be something else is so deep you know when it's like when you especially when you're that energy it doesn't go away we just learn how to deal with it but that was really um and again it might be kind of consumer so it might be about having things or having the bigger houses or you know but why you know why why do i not have that why do i not get to do that to be that um so yeah the question really is urgency you know you've you've said like how an artwork should be should be an urgent thing so you know how did that how does that like begin with you and like why why is that why do you why do you kind of yeah i mean you know again we forgot to expulsion you know shout out to lincolnshire my cousin who who did part of the uh the the voice over brought my words to life along with um artists uh james jordan johnson and uh christian bravo you know they again they they they believed enough in what i was talking about and also had connected relationships with some of the things that i that i was explaining that it allowed it allowed a space where with with each of them in different situations we were able to to to conversate a lot about um these kinds of things like memory wise and where they had like kind of like connecting relationships um yeah there has to be i think when i'm making for me you know when making work that that can have such a heavy subject matter especially if it becomes autobiographical there has to be a um you know there has to be like a certain like pulling thing within within my heart or my soul that that keeps me um engaged for the ride you know like otherwise it you know then there's no difference with perhaps like a documentary work i think because the documentaries it's you know and i made i actually made um it it won't be released until until next year but i made my first like documentary this year very short film and the the approach i understand with that now it's very different to you know making you know even a film that does kind of talk about facts does talk about actual histories and whatnot it's just a whole different process and and creatively you have the the the keys to the environment to really um reconsider how that is you know how that is heard how that is seen how that feels so you know there are those moments where i'm talking about you know wishing i could have been playing mortal kombat or you know playing you know super mario kart very real things that i'd like you know like be imagining and like but i'm here and um just that that weird groundhog feeling of just being stuck just doing again and again and again and i guess you know what i find interesting with that is of course the the the space is or one of the main spaces you see in in the expulsion is like you know an office um which you know some people talk about that kind of job as being you know really dreary and obnotinous and so on but actually you know what try doing like cleaning jobs like we you know those are the things you have to do like there's i don't think that you know yeah of course i think i i'm not saying that that there isn't um you know dreariness with with kind of office space work but in terms of like cleaning literally doing the exact same thing again and again and again and then this approach to um as i say in the films you know sanctifying a place or spaces that will become sullied every single day like and having to kind of like build up the the the willpower let alone energy or anything to to go back to these same sites to to see habits because you see physical habits of people some people who you know they deal with waste in a certain way and other people are really gross excuse my language are really gross yeah you know um so so like i said you know in in terms of this atmosphere of of of creating a film work there has to be for me uh you know a consideration of of how how creatively the conversation can be brought up because otherwise yeah it does become perhaps a bit too much it becomes too much of a chore in itself and then you know there as a result it doesn't feel like it doesn't feel like you know these conversations that are important are being brought in to the table in a way that i think are necessary and the the need to do that you know i don't sometimes the harshness of the reality needed not be presented like straight away in that sense sometimes you know that build up or that slow kind of you know um inhaling and then exhaling of of of of that is is is necessary and it's what i love about making film you know which is you know i love i love time travel you know for me films of time travel and so you know you have you have space to to work with that yeah no i mean time is another major theme in your work that i really wanted to you know obviously you've done you know you have your sanco time and you need collapse timing i know you're interested in um you know you're very into gaming and the way that um that time is dealt with in gaming or in sci-fi you know and the way that film can sort of make time ambiguous and go beyond it and and at the same time be just you know ultimately destroyed by it but that is we are running out of time so i have one one last question um i think we've got time just for this one um you know thinking that this is you know you film london i really really really hope that you get this award um i think they deserve it but you um you know you're you're such a incredibly talented artist you know you can work with your hands you work with your mind you can you know you can you're so resourceful and you do so many different things but why film you know film is expensive it's difficult it takes time you have to deal with so much red tape um why why why make films you know i think i think within our you know our our conversation it it's a it's because of all the the types of possibilities that that connect itself with it you know that for me film unlike many other like mediums or approaches it marries the potential and the power of many things you know it's not just sound it's not just you know i'm not you know i love building a beautiful visual you see that with examples of films but it's not just about that for me it's it is about the sound it is about the conversation it's about the repeated conversation the the um the changes in between repeating those conversations or referring to those um you know that yeah the possibility to build things to physically feel them and then to have to kind of take that point of letting go of stepping back traveling you know traveling to environments traveling to sites to new places learning about new things um i just think that you know film in that respect is but you know what the funny thing is i know you said like you know yeah it is it can be expensive but like i guess you know for me i i shoot with a lot of my own equipment and and build things with my own equipment so i've you know i've worked a way that you know where i hustle it where it can work for me which is funding to always you know provide what it needs to like you're saying urgency you know so like i i can't i'm not waiting for the arts counselors to say oh this is viable so now you can shoot that urgent thing like you know i've got to be ready i got to be you know and and i'll you know i'll shoot rushes even to begin with right um but it's it's it's the excitement that it allows and that communal potential that that can be built with that and i've not you know again yeah i work with other forms i work with visuals stills painting photography and whatnot and the the collaborative or communal should i say space i don't think is as as open with those areas you know because i'm going to build a painting or whatnot yeah unless i need someone to assist me with something i i have the vision of the thing i'm just going to go and do it right with filmmaking it just there's just it's just that expansive uh kind of you know potential to to to to to conversate and to relate you know even the idea of like being in the cinema and talking about the different experiences of that you know even if i don't necessarily agree with someone else's experience but we have that connecting space um and then you know when and when when all is said and done within the the realm of art contemporary art and so on i think it's a medium that if you know respected enough like you can you can connect people in a way that you know that i think is important um yeah i don't know there's so much going on i think that's thing and it kind of more than any art form i guess in the way photography maybe does to an extent but it transcends those boundaries that fine art or art you know with a capital a has been has been like bound up in in terms of like access absolutely so i mean it's sunday and it's going to be sunday night um very soon and when i met you for the first time at your when you had a studio something else you had i mean you could hardly move for the piles of like dvds games like that was pretty much i was like what is he making in him and then a lot of cables so i know you must have something that you could recommend um to watch or something that you've been watching lately or that has been that you always return to i know that there's some yeah things you're a fan of is there anything you can yeah no i've got some recommendations um oh gosh i watched it again uh just last night actually a film called the harder day for uh it's a new film by james samuel i recommend the soundtrack as well really cool western film that i think just it just does things differently from from the the usual expectations cinematically speaking uh castlevania as also a sebastian netflix series uh produced by uh a.d shankar um really love his work love what he did with um judge dredd uh which you know if you're into that if you're into comics definitely check that out as well but yeah castlevania is you know based on the video games as well of course uh metroid dread a nintendo game that was just recently released on the nintendo switch um it is uh it's you know it's just the way that it harks back to the the super nintendo era of video games super metroid and whatnot and picks off with with with the story of of the metroid series really cool um the eternals um directed by chloe gel uh so yeah marvel film uh i'd say it's the most different of all the marvel films it's just very weird and i think unfortunately for that reason it's kind of like been reviewed in in an unfair light but what i love about uh zhao's kind of approach to filmmaking in that is the use of light the use of natural light and filming you don't see that in a marvel film and you know i like marvel films as well i like the comics and whatnot um oh yeah and i just finished uh the loki television series but i'm recommended also especially the soundtrack by uh natalie holt i think that's really really cool there's some really good synth um you know kind of wizardry and witchcraft to play that is just beautiful we know you're a fan of the symptoms thank you i've got enough for a week oh yeah lasting a week now larry thank you so much honestly it's such a pleasure to spend the sunday afternoon with you i would happily chat to you every sunday afternoon and yeah good luck i really hope that that this award will be yours but um and thanks to everyone for joining and watching and listening thanks so much and much appreciation to each other thank you welcome back to the film london john award white chapel weekend live online at the white chapel gallery my name is greta gerson and i'm the production coordinator at film london artist moving image network and we organize the film london german award um shortly we'll be hearing from shortlisted artist adham faramawi who's here on screen with me but before we get to that i just wanted to again mention a few housekeeping points we're really thrilled to be able to have captions for all of the presentations today and if you want those you can switch them on and off using the subtitles slash captions button at the bottom of the screen after we hear from ad tam and their collaborators we'll be going straight into a break and again i encourage you to use that break to explore the works by all the shortlisted artists that are on the white chapel gallery website and you can also access work by adham there if you are watching by youtube to access the works by the shortlist you'll need to switch over to the whitechapel gallery website find the film london german award program on the events page and then click the button that says launch weekend hub page and you'll be able to find the works there and if you're watching from the white chapel gallery website all you need to do is scroll down and all of those works have captions available as well apart from georgina star's film quarantine because it doesn't feature any dialogue so to introduce the next uh portion of the event um i'd like to introduce adham nisha and kostas um who we're really happy to have here with us this afternoon so adhan faramari works across a wide range of media from computer programs moving image and apps to print their performance for camera videos are often installed as part of sculptural assemblages the works consider how social issues become entangled with environmental issues and the works use movement poetry spoken word and dance telling stories about consumption identity construction the body and the nature of desire first we will hear from the poet nisha ramayana her poetry collection states of the body produced by love is published by ignota books recent poems and essays can be found online in cca annex juf and spanzine she teaches creative writing at queen mary university of london then adham will be in conversation with costas das nopolus who's a curator and writer working at the intersection of art ecology and identity he is assistant curator of live programs at the serpentine london focusing on back to earth and general ecology together with hansel rick obres artistic director of the serpentine he's the co-editor of 140 artists ideas for planet earth so thank you so much for being here this afternoon i'm really looking forward to this presentation and him over to you thank you greta um hi everyone i am at home foreign and before we start in earnest i just wanted to thank film london and greta hewson especially and the white chapel gallery for hosting this event and having me and to everyone watching for being here uh i want to say thanks to costa stadionopoulos and nishiramaya for agreeing to do this together um nisha is a writer whose work i first encountered when i found her book states of the body produced by love in the library at the university that i work at and i couldn't help but be intoxicated by the richness of her language anish's poetry has very directly influenced and fed into the work that i've made since then so i was really grateful when the opportunity came to talk together and to share the work that i've made uh that's been developed in dialogue with hers and i'm really excited to hear nisha's word spoken in her own voice so i'm going to hand it over to you now nisha thank you so much for doing this hi thanks so much um i'm so glad to be here to celebrate abraham i'm going to share with you a few poems um that i hope speak to the textures of adhan's amazing work in different ways and written with i think shared concerns that we have or motifs um i won't give them all away but some of them include river softness slime um written poems are written with corresponding questions that i think we share about place um about linguistic and embodied forms and the polycema censorium of weird knowledge um and i'm going to just read straight through more or less begin with kamla lotus flower the tenth mahavidya hail lakshmi the good sign gaja lakshmi elephant one who is not dead nectar residue of the sacrifice she is the antidote to poison she is the poison itself she is the poison state sanctioned documents honorific prefix holding a lotus she rose to the top she is the poison foaming progress betray profane rosie or safflower dominion she is the poison for white elephants conferring immortality produced at the turning of the ocean this is not where i want to begin begin with honey love and family homes every other holiday spent in india holidays are constitutive time in india vivifies time not in india as time in scotland living vice time not in scotland missing something makes me feel at home growing up with my family's memories my inability to separate myself from my family's memories to disentangle our versions of india our dreams of the future begin with the yellow leaved view of things seen from a distance as seen between seasons as seen through the stickiness of an unclean break hail shri mixing cooking diffusing light begin with the possibility of this break never ending of the endless possibilities of return hail adithy not tide free boundless eternal and infinite expanse the names of deities are points on a map utter your flight paths home muddy rivers filthy tributaries ginger symbols but fries skip and send trilling confounding dome it's bear traps city one of its many hearts mirrored blades dice mirrored butterflies one bug says writing is piping through sewage and a tonal motion that foments plots to escape and static can fire touch the fire in my pocket of time stay unquenched in a vacuumed sky another bug a nice snail asks nicely i salt him back i square the piney collar that oyster souls may pass intact bugs lie digest slime trails gash in this city and better animals get hurt if we're going to leave we have to leave now we have to clean first you say look i get it but now you need to stop charge render spirit vacuous enervate matter longed for cryospheric break throw out a line of voice herring shoal in a basement here soft glints curdle soft clumps paul they must wick to watch performance is the show swimming back in time returning with bulletproof teeth or leaving me screaming off stage faces lit up in the blazing trash but all memory comes to your side for the theophany little soldier boy fades into dunkleosteus raves smash wings in the dust in the windowless room the diva charms her harmonic sprangs bang wallet into walls condensation blueing remember the scene blue scales plasmaed to sky sweating walls razor clan censorium oil painting thick sky grip licked open to blues see how easy to disappear completely how to forget the moonraker lasers of love that made me a competition that's love if you ask where we should meet one more time if you ask by valves to hold unsustaining notes moments the line emits break the chain of choice the world is cold thorns i am thorns flames blue other people electric blue hoops fumes air loving you betrays their system of being the gesture rudely jubilant our death in mood switching metal crescendo's our incendiary requiem then say what's for you sever is you lol noticing lull and notice must red algal buster sorry to be dead and still standing fingers pollute leave to go down trebly devotedly and there are uh two epigraphs of dictionary definitions of a three from the sanskrit english dictionary should say other three to descend make one's appearance rise to be in the right place to set a going render current a tara descent especially of a deity from heaven any new and unexpected appearance a sacred place translation and that's where we get the word avatar and from lily sloan from the movie star trek first contact you do have books in the 24th century and a little argument um so even sent to the narrative mira leaves her husband and embarks on the path of bhakti for devotion the peacock navigates mono mania and unseasonable meditativeness star trek the next generation provides fan service her brush forsaken darkly rushing absence of absence what she never felt before meera feels she steals to step down heart too full for status what is she casting off reproducing the social order in song my liege in whose butter brewed hands i back up starlightly stowaway of love caulk bubbling elusively her no out spilling from no to never never know mira breaks ring fingers for her lover i don't believe it means she breaks her buns that unorthodoxy is sh my native shore at compasses end it's a personal risk some say the end is personal boats motorhomes zoos who says that consanguineous rhymes with cool etude that descendants stink of tympanic dribble meera says world disorder turtle is where the shore begins chorus off but him diving down from where down is meera sings to ancient communists squitting her bondage the ones who crash landed on our planet before it was ours if accumulation ever was anomalous sweetening crust her start in life with devotional hymns what swims it's mirror initiate the poet same thing ultramarine notes blown and popping in my heart a neutronium hull noses out of the seabed that's advanced alien technology here on earth yes earth where god's come from acquire and use burnish not like this unsacralizable ooze cosmological patina you can't look nor touch poetic intention emanates from the hull mirror compensates to discern but his name libraries couldn't hold the names in these little drops but his name but his name but his name spells me where she knew her knowing narrower would lead aloud my boat when it breaks snow rising from the archaea to kiss the keel call me when you get this message played in reverse sung by a motley crew on a cloth fitted craft invoking ishmael is to concede to these prevarications how to follow a line at such thought engendering altitudes and abysms without folding foolishness in how to lay it bare heart too full for oneness where call i but from my own shallows from my easiest to access but to him who's looking for a good time and another who's steeple chasing the weakest degree of want and another again our green hand moonly mouldering away in letters to specters they are manly hourglasses out of time i would die for you i would write for you i would sand my rudeness flat for you melville says the whale descends setting men to work in its projected field occasioning songs of not knowing meanwhile in the jeffries tube mira does drunk in love for her love incarnated time after time if i told you what we were doing here why i wanted to bring you you think blesses me my simple pleasures without words to express them except harmonious co-laboring oily circuitry consumptive offerings then again translation is the song that rested people call restive striking rather than heaving to reeling the rope bridge just let me hide mirror says in my voice in my favorites in these fools let me tell this story from the future of the canon to the mortar of the past from war to war as love goes some say the circle has a hole in the middle others conject the momentum of willful tearing black holes blood orange and skies greeting down the tide of the world i see the prelude of study heart to full for exactitude comes close from [Music] the sad smoke of our origins our safe distance our wet socks from the modernity of our sleeplessness polymorphous deities sacrilegious throbs that goddess doesn't mean what you think it does it is farther away and she looks i myth i'm going to die i will be slime trail and that's it thank you very much thank you so much nisha that was incredible i really i i can't get over that um and also there was more star trek fan fiction in there than i was expecting that was really really powerful and um i could already you know see many connections forming with what we're about to discuss and as always with nieces words they they ripple and they come back to us and hopefully they will come back to us again in this conversation thank you so much for having me um i really want to start just by saying thanks cost us for agreeing to have the conversation with me but also it feels like a good place to start to just to say you know um you've played a role in the development of my work for the past few years so costas and i have worked together and he's someone that i've gone to for advice on working development and it's that knowledge of the working process that's got me really looking forward to talking together today thank you so much adam um i was very fortunate to be um in dialect with you in the very beginning of the artist subtle various and sweet um when it's you know it was in preparation in order to be premiered for the symposium the shape of a circle in mind of a fist the understory of the understory at serpentine online in december 2020 and i just wanted to start with the beginning really and see where that takes us um you know the early settle varies in suite is a deeply layered work that creates a bridge between um the expansive former mars land near your flight new hampshire here in east london and egypt to the home country of your parents um i wanted to ask you if you could tell us a little bit about the beginning of this project's journey and the ideas that led to working on this film yeah um okay the the video that's included in the german shortlist was honestly a very challenging work to make so 2020 was a chaotic year in many ways and it's hard for me to talk about this video outside of the circumstances that produced it you know like for almost everybody uh the pandemic sharpened some of the pressures in my life so when locked down here um a lot of my work was postponed or cancelled my flatmate moved out immediately so i ended up spending most of the year alone and you know without human contact which was okay you know i was safe and not everybody was but also anyone that spent that long alone can tell you it weighs heavy i got into some very public racialized fights with institutions i've worked with not least for my teaching work at the university which pays my bills this was at the height of the black lives matter's uh protests and during all of this my father passed away so i wasn't able to attend his funeral in egypt and um and actually i i watched an online wake some of his friends and colleagues streamed on youtube which i sat through after frankly a very long and racist meeting for a charity i'd been working for so actually in a lot of ways this video became kind of central to my grieving process it was a way for me to think through my complex relationship with my father by considering our di

2021-11-18 13:14

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