The physical coastline becomes a metaphor for a ruptured piece of skin barely holding together a volatile state of being ready to explode.

Filmed in the dark of the night during religious festivities in a village in South India, the margin between land and water becomes a point of release beyond which characters experience fear, surprise, anger, sadness, trust, anticipation, excitement, contempt but also rapture as they wash off the masquerade.

Read an essay by the artist on the work here.

The epic crossings of an Ife head emerged from the question: Does homeland long for us? This work visualizes the journey of a Nigerian Ife head who longs for her descendents in the Americas. Ogunji paints her face to suggest the facial markings of this artifact and then makes the difficult attempt to fly. Her stop-motion animation techniques give the viewer a sense of strained movement and flight with a journey that is marked by truncated breathing and cacophonous sounds as she flies through the air in search of history and the future.

In Search of Vanished Blood is inspired by a text from Christa Wolf’s 1983 novel Cassandra. In the video play the story concerns a declining world in which Cassandra offers a way out if only we would listen and learn from the cruelties that have taken place in the past and to create a more humane situation. The video play is interrupted by an account of a woman who is brutally raped. In Search of Vanished Blood extends Malani’s exploration of violence, the regenerative power of myth, the feminine voice, and the geo-politics of national identity. While referencing the place of women in Indian society, this work weaves together content from across cultures and time to other contexts and conditions in its interrogation of issues relating to justice, gender and their representation, by including literary texts, mythology and accounts of historical events.

The video play revolves around complex themes such as the curse of prophecy, the lethal position of women, and the failure of human communication. As such the work translates across cultures as it interrogates issues relating to justice, gender and representation.

The title and the main text in this work come from Agha Shahid Ali’s translation of the Urdu poem Lahu Ka Suragh (1965) by the Pakistani left-wing intellectual and revolutionary poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz. It references Christa Wolf’s version of Cassandra, and Rainer Maria Rilke’s book, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, 1910. The soundtrack is inspired by a selection of texts from Heiner Müller’s Hamletmachine (1977), Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape (1958), and the short story Draupadi by the Indian social activist and writer Mahasweta Devi, translated by Gayatri Spivak.

A new commission of the work In Search of Vanished Blood (2012/2022) is currently on view and projected on the façade of the M+ museum in Hong Kong through October 30, 2022, where a major solo exhibition of the artist Nalini Malani: Vision in Motion was recently held.

The video is filmed at Ryugakubo, an illusory pond bearing various ryujin (dragon god) folktales. The video highlights how water from the Ryugakubo, which supplies water for daily life of local people, is carried from one hand to the other to be poured into a barrel.

Branches are Roots in the Sky functions as visual exegesis of a “pre-constructed” rather than a “de-constructed” world. It presents entropic processes and emergent order in a stream of homologous imagery spanning temporal and physical scales—topological variations in still and turbulent water, the etching of river ways through a landmass, the emergent and entropic cycles of life and decay in a forest. An accompanying soundscape similarly dilates or contracts natural processes to the temporal scale of human perception.

Ouragualamalma takes a look at the cruel exploitation of natural and human resources that resulted in the decimation of ancient civilizations, ancestral Latin American cultures. Time passed, time passes and the mark of evil persists. What we see today is a murderous form of reckless exploitation, causing terrible environmental disasters – the outcome not of nature, but of the ignorance of the exploiting man, who does not have eyes to see beyond himself. A persistent interference, a message in the language of beings from beyond the earth, announces a sign, a warning that comes from the sky to protect us.

The first time I visited Standing Rock was four years ago. At the time, I did not see these prairie dogs tunneling through the quiet grassy plains that stretched into the distance－they were on the other side of the hills. Since then however, an oil pipeline was planned and protesters arrived en masse. The construction company’s bulldozers, thousands of protesters, and the mass media all congregated on the other side of the hills, filling television news and social media with images of human strife.

No one noticed that, meanwhile, the prairie dogs were being driven out of their home, over the hills, and resettling here. I recorded their movements, imperceptible from above ground, and attempted to question the supposedly “natural” scenery in front of me. – Kato Tsubasa

In his continuous engagement with the Partition of India, through the work Objects of fictitious togetherness-I (shown at a number of locations within India), through the trope of water, Atul Bhalla attempts to conceptualize the interplay between memory, post-memory and truth around the Freedom Struggle, the Partition and subsequent events in Punjab. In this work, he aims to use a part of a wall painting on the convergence of an arch at the Guru Ki Masjid, the only mosque built by a Sikh Guru, which is located in his ancestral village of Sri Hargobindpur and is now a UNESCO site.

He attempts to conjure history in referential dialogue, by re-addressing lost pasts, and re-locating such in the personal, the social, and the cultural. But here the cracks, like a wound or dehiscence, dissolve and reappear. They are slow but pending and present, unfocused as one’s vision is, that one is unable to grasp.

The work poetically addresses the people, territories and the politics of water sharing, rivers and borders activated by the historical moment of the Partition. Drawing on local meanings of rivers and water of the land for each community and Punjabis in general, in the larger context of the work Bhalla wishes examine the notion of truth within ‘Punjabiyat’ (being from the Punjab) on which both Hindus and Muslims pride themselves here and across the border. In particular, he focuses on how truth has unfolded itself during the trauma of the Partition and what truth means today within the South Asian context.

In The Future They Ate From The Finest Porcelain resides in the cross-section between science-fiction, archaeology and middle-east politics. Combining live action, computer generated imagery and historical photographs the film explores the role of myth in history, fact and national identity. A narrative resistance group makes underground deposits of elaborate porcelain – suggested to belong to an entirely fictional civilisation. Their aim is to influence history and support future claims to their vanishing lands.

In the Future They Ate From the Finest Porcelain co-produced and co-directed with Søren Lind and co-commissioned by FLAMIN Productions through Film London Artists’ Moving Image Network with funding from Arts Council England; New Art Exchange; Bluecoat, Liverpool; Wolverhampton Art Gallery, Wolverhampton; and The Mosaic Rooms, A.M.Qattan Foundation, London; with support from Doha Film Institute; The Danish Arts Council, Arts Council England, Iambic Film, Knud Højgaards Fond and Contemporary Art Platform – Kuwait. Produced by Spike Film and Video, Bristol.

The nomadic displacement between natural and urban landscapes reveals the contradictions inherent to the modernist project of Latin America: How are we seen? How do we see ourselves? Is it our self-awareness representation or idealization?

The eye floats over the Leachates, searching for the code that divides reality in two parts: the garbage and the origin. Artworks fall out of the sky? Do we find them along the road avoiding vultures and scavengers? Or do they find us? The left-and-right game (product of our political eye) bounces off in myriad directions from the glass walls. It bounces inside the vacuum of a transparent box that reflects the exterior with different lenses, but that does not distort it.

In response to the spatial coordinates proposed by Cartesian logic, the oneiric character of the film discloses the sovereignty of hallucination beyond class distinctions. Subverting spatial conventions inherited from Renaissance perspective (those that had determined film space since its invention), the film inquires: Are we protagonists or spectators? Are we inside or outside the cube?

In the Western tradition of the Enlightenment, darkness is an uncomfortable place. The lack of visibility and of clarity is associated with the absence of knowledge, with the monstrous, with the hidden, and with those states of humanity closest to bestiality. It is the witching hour, a time of danger and helplessness. All cats are black at night, which in Spanish popular wisdom belongs to wolves and thieves.

What can we find, then, in this nocturnal scene, the shadowy state presented by Sara Ramo in her video Os Ajudantes (The Helpers)? What kind of help is offered? We distinguish three elements which barely serve to help build a narrative, and which place us in a dreamlike atmosphere: bonfires that allow us to catch a glimpse of something; people in masks who enter and exit the frame in a seemingly senseless stroll; and the music that they play, which we are unable to associate with any other recognisable melody from classic tunes. In this way, the hidden and indiscernible, the masks and the sounds, force us to press our abilities of perception and attention, as well as to question our possible analyses. When the light surges, though just for an instant, nature appears noisier and more exuberant, only to return again to a state of semi-darkness.

– Marta Ramos-Yzquierdo

Toil tells a story of a woman, a woman who has dedicated her life to activism and the liberation of people and of her own people. Some might even call her a feminist. The story looks at how the world and its systems have always deterred women, often to the point of surrender.

As women, we frequently get to a point that we think that the work is done, but it in fact, it has just begun. This story takes inspiration from activists such as Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, Josina Machel, women of the 32 Battalion and Angolan women during the civil war and post-war in Angola. These women sowed the seeds but never ate the fruits of their labour, for example, Josina Machel died before she saw a liberated Mozambique. In the same vein, women of the 32 Battalion faced many hardships historically which continue to creep into the present. In another instance, women of post war angola face disproportionate economic inequality, misogyny and inequality at large. Winnie Madikizela-Mandela saw a ‘free’ South Africa but her name was tarnished.

In moving towards a decentralised world, we must be conscious of historical injustices towards women who fought for the freedoms that we have today and not perpetuate a culture of disempowerment. Women who fight, who stand up to injustices and inequalities should be able to reap the victories of the seeds that they sowed.

The Empty Plaza/La Plaza Vacía is a single-channel video. Inspired by the organized public protests in the Middle East beginning in 2011, the artist took note of the communal spaces around the world being utilized and, in contrast, those left empty.

The empty Plaza de la Revolución in Havana, Cuba becomes the protagonist in her meditation on public space, revolutionary promise, and memory. Intermittent close-range views bring the Plaza’s architecture into focus; long takes documenting Fusco’s passage through the vacant square are punctuated by vintage archival footage depicting scenes from Post-Revolutionary Cuba. Throughout the duration of the video, a Spanish narration, written by acclaimed Cuban journalist Yoani Sanchez, describes what appears—and does not appear—in view. Also on exhibit are film stills from The Empty Plaza. Cinematic in impact, the images are dominated by a broad horizon line as the large sky and the vast civic plaza are nearly equalized.

“The absence of public in some plazas seemed just as resonant and provocative as its presence in others,” Fusco recalls. “Cuba’s Plaza of the Revolution is one such place—a stark, inhospitable arena where all the major political events of the past half-century have been marked by mass choreography, militarized displays and rhetorical flourish. I decided to create a piece about that legendary site—an empty stage filled with memories, through which every foreigner visitor passes, while nowadays many, if not most, Cubans flee.”

Unmoving rock collapsed to ocean—geology’s “thrust and fold”—becomes the unlikely habitat for two actors’ shadowy encounters with sand, waves, night, desert, dread, calm, trepidation and escape.

“Shambhavi Kaul’s Night Noon sets up dialectical dread in Death Valley with a series of uncanny shots of eroded, geological formations and dunes that seemingly fold into night skies and shimmering waters. Beginning in Zabriskie Point, the film surreptitiously crosses over into Mexico, its creative geography never far from our cinematic memory.”

– Andréa Picard

Kiluanji Kia Henda’s video installation Concrete Affection – Zopo Lady (2014) references modern architecture in Luanda and the mass exodus of Portuguese and white Angolan citizens after Angola’s independence from Portugal in 1975. Inspired by Ryszard Kapuściński’s book Another Day of Life (1976), which documented the last days of colonialism in Luanda, the film includes images of key modern sites, terraces, buildings, streets, and avenues that are uninhabited with a narrator recounting his personal experience, and the painful decision to leave the city he was born in and lived in his entire life. In preparing his box for shipment, the narrator is confronted by platonic love for a woman: the impossibility of ‘boxing affections’ torments him and undermines his plans to escape. The crate structure references modern architectural facades, which are common to buildings in Luanda realized during the colonial era. The installation is also based on the scenario caused by the exodus, when thousands of boxes with personal belongings were sent from Angola to Portugal by those who were trying to escape the chaos that ensued in this proxy battleground for the Cold War powers.

Gigi Scaria’s narrative marks his preoccupation with contemporary anthropocene urgencies: his practice is largely based on hyper-urbanization, environmental devastation, global warming, and warnings of (human) self-destruction of mother earth and her habitat. His practice veers between paintings, sculptures and animated videos.

We live in dystopic times. We have emerged or continue to remain in a pandemic, between this a war ensues taking proportions that we are unable to envisage the future of. But when Gigi created this video in 2015 his reference points were other times in history. 8 years later, this work remains to be precient. It speaks to this current moment in time as a reminder that the landscape stiched together through images of refugee camps, sourced through varying times in history, continue to scroll with no beginning or end.

In this video, ‘Expanded’ (2015) painstakingly mapped, these vast stretches of refugee settlements across history seamlessly come together as a mass landscape of interim solution, or maybe, habit. Are there food packages being distributed, the absence of the human presence is stark. Is it a preparation for things to come, have the humans vacated?

Be it Auschwitz, in Nazi Germany, Darfur in Sudan or Syria today. How does one emerge out of these temporary habitats? Where do these people return to? How long do these spaces continue to be of refuge? How safe are they? The monotonous grey landscape gives no answers, and quietly continues to scroll in its horizontal quietude.