The Refracted Body

Thảo Nguyên Phan

Becoming Alluvium, 2019, 16 minutes

Becoming Alluvium is Phan’s most recent work: a single-channel colour film continuing her research into the Mekong River and the cultures that it nurtures. Through allegory, it explores the environmental and social changes caused by the expansion of agriculture, by overfishing and the economic migration of farmers to urban areas. “The Mekong civilization can be summarized in terms of materiality – the river of wet rice civilization – and in terms of spirituality – the river of Buddhism,” explains Phan. “However,” she continues, “unlike the teachings of compassion and mindfulness that are taught by Buddha, in reality, the land through which the Mekong flows experiences extreme turbulence and conflict [...]. In recent decades, human intervention on the river body has been so violent that it has forever transformed the nature of its flow and the fate of its inhabitants.”

Thảo Nguyên Phan (born 1987, Vietnam) is a multimedia artist whose practice encompasses video, painting and installation. Drawing from literature, philosophy and daily life, Phan observes ambiguous issues in social conventions and history. She started working in film when she began her MFA in Chicago. Phan exhibits internationally, with solo and group exhibitions including Chisenhale gallery (London, 2020); WIELS (Brussels, 2020); Rockbund Art Museum (Shanghai, 2019); Lyon Biennale (Lyon, 2019); Sharjah Biennial (Sharjah Art Foundation, 2019); Gemäldegalerie (Berlin, 2018); Dhaka Art Summit (2018); Para Site (Hong Kong, 2018); Factory Contemporary Art Centre (Ho Chi Minh City, 2017); Nha San Collective (Hanoi, 2017); and Bétonsalon (Paris, 2016), among others. Phan currently lives and works in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.

Hira Nabi

All That Perishes at the Edge of Land, 2019, 30 minutes

Ocean Master, a decommissioned container vessel, enters into a dialogue with several workers at the Gadani yards. The conversation moves between dreams, desires, places that can be called home, and the violence embedded in the act of dismantling a ship at Gadani. As the workers recall the homes and families they left behind, the long work days mesh indistinguishably into one another, and they are forced to confront the realities of their work in which they are faced with death every day. How may they survive and look towards the future? The film was supported by Vasl Artists Association, Goethe-Institut Pakistan, Prince Claus Fund.

Hira Nabi (born 1987, Pakistan) is an artist and filmmaker who works with images and text to tell stories of the everyday. Her practice is concerned with the environment, the often unseen, and a slow process of re-earthing: by which she intends to shift focus away from anthropocentric stories into a more interconnected and larger witnessing of the times we live in. Her work has been shown in a number of group exhibitions including the Lahore Biennale (2018), Colomboscope (2019), Dhaka Art Summit (2020) as well as SAVVY Contemporary and HKW (Berlin), Ashkal Alwan (Beirut), Johann Jacobs Museum (Zurich), Warehouse 421 (Abu Dhabi), Extra City (Antwerp), MIT School of Architecture, Dartmouth University, and The New School. She has shown at film festivals including CPH:DOX, Sundance, AFI Docs, Rencontres Internationales, DokuFest among others. She was awarded the 2020 Next Generation Prince Claus Award, and was nominated for the IDA Best Short Award (2021), and the Han Nefkens Foundation Award (2020). Nabi is currently based in Lahore, Pakistan.

Laleh Khorramian

Water Panics in the Sea, 2011, 14 minutes

Laleh Khorramian’s Water Panics in the Sea, is the fourth instalment in the short films series based on the five elements of Earth, Air, Fire, Water and Ether. Constructed through a process of iterative magnification and manipulation of minute details derived from monotype prints and drawings, the film seeks to question our habituated perception by an intricate use of scale, distance, time and space. An original soundtrack was produced in collaboration with composer and musician Shahzad Ismaily, creating a theatrical framework through a similar process of layering and sampling.

Laleh Khorramian (born 1974, Iran) studied at the Rhode Island School of Design and received her undergraduate degree at The School of The Art Institute of Chicago, and her MFA at Columbia University, New York. Her work takes theatre and the spectacle as its point of departure, to explore aspects of human nature and emotional states of consciousness, and the possibilities of drawing as a medium. Khorramian has exhibited internationally, including shows in MASSMOCA, U.S.A; Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Art Basel Statements, Switzerland; Ballroom Marfa, Texas; Istanbul Museum of Art, Istanbul; The Sundance Film festival; The Midnight Moment in Times Sq and The Queensland Art Gallery, Australia. In 2013, Bartleby and Co, Brussels, published her first limited edition artist book Include Amplified Toilet Water, housed in the collections of MOMA, NYC, Centre Pompidou, Paris, Columbia University, NYC, Royal Library of Belgium, Brussels. Khorramian currently lives and works in New York.

Vincent Monnikendam

Mother Dao, The Turtlelike, 1995, 87 minutes

Mother Dao, The Turtlelike is a documentary about life in the former Dutch East Indies, composed of documentary films made in the period 1912-1932. The images feature quotes from old Javanese and modern Indonesian poems, as well as lyrics and songs by Niassers, Toradja's and Sundanese. The composition is made by Monnikendam with fragments from old nitrate films about the former Dutch East Indies. The film focuses on the way in which the Netherlands managed its colony in the period 1912-1933. The film was awarded the Golden Calf for Best Long Documentary at the Dutch Film Festival. The recordings, mostly made for propaganda purposes, reflect the colonial mentality of yesteryear. They show the European as a white tropical suit, always giving directions, supervisor, missionary or administrator. A special soundtrack with natural sounds, indigenous music and poetry has been added to the images, recorded without sound.

Vincent Monnikendam (1936, The Hague) worked for the Dutch television (NOS) before he became an independent documentary maker in 1995. A lot of his films concern social themes such as immigration or race issues and have required long and intensive research.

Deborah Stratman

Vever (for Barbara), 2019, 12 minutes

A cross-generational binding of three filmmakers seeking alternative possibilities to power structures they’re inherently part of. The film grew out of abandoned film projects of Maya Deren and Barbara Hammer. Shot at the furthest point of a motorcycle trip Hammer took to Guatemala in 1975, and laced through with Deren’s reflections of failure, encounter and initiation in 1950s Haiti. A vever is a symbolic drawing used in Haitian Voodoo to invoke a Loa, or god.

Deborah Stratman (1967, USA) makes films and artworks that investigate power, control and belief, considering how places, ideas, and society are intertwined. Recent projects have addressed freedom, surveillance, sinkholes, comets, raptors, orthoptera, levitation, exodus, mineral evolution, sisterhood and faith. She has exhibited internationally at venues including MoMA (NY), Centre Pompidou (Paris), Hammer Museum (LA), Witte de With (Rotterdam), PS1 (NY), Tabakalera (San Sebastian), Austrian Film Museum (Vienna), Yerba Buena Center (SF), MCA (Chicago), Whitney Biennial (NY) and has done site-specific projects with venues including the Center for Land Use Interpretation, Temporary Services, Hallwalls, Mercer Union and Ballroom Marfa. Stratman’s films have been featured widely at festivals and conferences including Sundance, Viennale, Berlinale, CPH:DOX, Oberhausen, True/False, TIFF, Locarno, Rotterdam, the Flaherty and Docs Kingdom. She is the recipient of Fulbright, Guggenheim and USA Collins Fellowships, an Alpert Award, Sundance Art of Nonfiction Award and grants from Creative Capital, Graham Foundation, Harpo Foundation and Wexner Center for the Arts. She lives in Chicago where she teaches at the University of Illinois.

Mónica Baptista

Strong Waters (Água Forte), 2019, 15 minutes

STRONG WATERS (ÁGUA FORTE) is a film made on a trip to the Amazon rainforest (from February to May 2015), preserving a trace of a series of encounters. Made according to a structural plan, this film consists of 5 reels of 16mm hand-processed film and lasts approximately 15 minutes. In the beginning of the film we listen to the Creation myth of the Corripaco, an indigenous people of the Amazon (Brazil, Colombia and Peru), in which the first God, the God Principle, living in a vertical and silent world, sees his excrements emerge from the deep waters–the navel of the world. STRONG WATERS follows the course of a river, intersecting different temporalities: the mythological and the essay–typical of travel journals–, composing a horizontal reflection, like a landscape, and finally collapsing into a wild object born from the unconscious. A sensory, immersive composition takes us on a journey to a place that seems to have stopped intime but remains timeless. A female voice reads a mythological text on the origin of the world and sets the tone for a documentary-meditation on the presence of primeval elements–like water and flora–and their cohabitation with the natives, whose portraits intersperse the film. The stealthy camera follows a boat drifting across the calm waters of a river, as if the latter were the rings of a tree disclosing its history, in a movement that lulls us and drives us to the physical and metaphysical core. Finally, accompanied by an ancestral chant, the etching gives way to a sequence of images (which in turn emerge like a river reducing the field of action to the essential) and moves into a poetic terrain, summoning the imagination of each one.

Mónica Baptista (1984, Portugal) is an artist and experimental filmmaker based in Porto, Portugal. She studied Fine Arts-Painting and has delved into experimental cinema and documentary, using mainly analogue formats asSuper8, 16mm and 35mm, while also employing video and photography. She currently lives and works in Porto.

Ana Vaz

APIYEMIYEKÎ?, 2019, 27 minutes

An archive of drawings made by the Waimiri-Atroari during their first literacy experience builds a collective visual memory from their learning process, perspective and territory while documenting their encounter with “civilised man”. Apiyemiyekî? was produced from within a series of newly commissioned works dedicated to constructing a critical cosmology of the Military Dictatorship in Brazil for the survey exhibition "Meta-Archive 1964-1985: Space for Listening and Reading on the Histories of the Military Dictatorship in Brazil" (Sesc-Belenzinho, São Paulo, Brazil). The film is a cinematographic portrait that departs from Brazilian educator and indigenous rights militant Egydio Schwade's archive — Casa da Cultura de Urubuí — found in his home at Presidente Figueiredo (Amazonas), where over 3000 drawings made by the Waimiri-Atroari, a people native to the Brazilian Amazon, during their first literacy process are currently kept.

Ana Vaz (1986, Brazil) was born in the mid 1980's in the Brazilian highlands inhabited by the ghosts buried by its modernist capital Brasília. Originally from the cerrado and wonderer by choice, Ana lived in the arid lands of central Brazil, in southern Australia, in the mangroves of northern France and finally also in its modern capital, Paris. Currently, she traces her walking between Paris, Lisbon and Brasília — axes of her practice and thinking. Her filmography activates and questions cinema as an art of the (in)visible as well as an instrument capable of dehumanising the human, expanding its connections and becoming's with other forms of life — other than human or spectral. Consequences or expansion of her cinemato-graphy, her activities are also embodied in writing, critical pedagogy, installations or collective walks. She currently lives and works in Lisbon.

Fausto Carlos, Takumã Kuikuro, Leonardo Sette

The Hyperwomen (Itão Kuẽgü), 2011, 80 minutes

The Jamurikumálu is an empowering female-only ritual of the Kuikuro tribe in the upper Xingu region of Mato Grosso. It involves a series of songs and choreographies dealing with love and sexual issues from a female perspective in a humorous manner, including the open choice of a sexual partner for the night. Village elder Kanu is the only woman who recalls all of the sacred songs that need to be performed, but she has fallen ill. Fearing the worst, Kanu’s pragmatic husband arranges for this ceremony to be performed again soon so the songs can be passed on. This cheerful portrayal of gender relations among the Kuikuro mixes documentary and fictional elements and draws strength from the power of music, community and tribal knowledge.

Parental guidance suggested as some scenes may not be suitable for younger viewers.

Carlos Fausto (born 1963, Brazil) is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the Museu Nacional (Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro) and has published worldwide. Fausto has been conducting fieldwork among Amazonian indigenous peoples since 1988 and is coordinating a video project among the Kuikuro people. Fausto currently lives and works in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

Leonardo Sette (born 1978, France) is a filmmaker, producer and editor. He attended film school in Cuba (EICTV) and France (La Fémis) and obtained a degree in Cinema History from the Sorbonne. His first short film Ocidente (2008) received the Best Film award at the Rio de Janeiro International Short Film Festival. Sette currently lives and works in Recife, Brazil.

Takumã Kuikuro (born 1983, Brazil) is an internationally recognised filmmaker and a member of the Kuikuro people, who grew up in the Ipatse village within the Alto Xingú Indigenous Territory in Mato Grosso state, central Brazil. Trained through Brazil’s well known NGO programme Video nas Aldeias (Video in the Villages), he has received international attention and acclaim for his films including The Day The Moon Menstruated, The Hyperwomen, and Kariokas. He currently lives and works in Brazil.

Lukas Marxt

Imperial Valley (cultivated run-off), 2018, 14 minutes

Accompanied by baleful, alarming, whistlingbooming electro sounds (Jung An Tagen), a speedy drone flight over California´s Imperial Valley becomes a journey in an extinct, abstract, uncanny, hostile landscape: a dystopian science fiction scenario, anchored in the reality of the present. (Michelle Koch, Diagonale 2018)

Lukas Marxt (born 1983, Austria) is an artist and filmmaker. His interest in the dialogue between human and geological existence and the impact of man on nature was first explored in his studies of geography and environmental sciences at the University of Graz, then developed through his audiovisual studies at the Linz University of Art. He holds an MA in Fine Arts from the Academy of Media Arts Cologne and completed the postgraduate program at the Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig. He currently lives and works between Cologne and Graz.

Laura Huertas Millán

Aequador, 2012, 19 minutes

Aequador is a travel account without words in a fictitious territory, reconstructed through video shootings made with a photo camera and inlayed totalitarian utopian architectures in 3D. We imagined an Alternate history, with a bygone age in which an extreme political power would set out to conquer the Amazonian forest. Aequador describes in a composite and voluntarily fragmentary way this parallel present, where fake ruins and relics of utopian architectures in 3D coexist with vernacular constructions and daily lives of human beings.

Laura Huertas Millan (born 1983, Colombia) is a French-Colombian filmmaker and visual artist, whose practise stands at the intersection between cinema, contemporary art and research. Selected in cinema festivals such as the Berlinale, Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), Rotterdam International Film Festival, New York Film Festival and Cinéma du Réel, her films have earned prizes at the Locarno Film Festival, FIDMarseille, Doclisboa and Videobrasil, among others. More than twenty retrospectives and focus of her work have been organised around the globe, in cinematheques such as Toronto ́s TIFF Lightbox, Harvard ́s Film Archive or Bogota ́s cinematheque, and leading film festivals as Mar del Plata and Rencontres du Documentaire de Montreal. She currently lives and works in Paris.

Allora & Calzadilla (in collaboration with Ted Chiang)

The Great Silence, 2014, 17 minutes

Allora & Calzadilla's film, The Great Silence, focuses on the world’s largest radio telescope, located in Esperanza, Puerto Rico, home to the last remaining wild populations of a critically endangered species of parrots. Science fiction author Ted Chiang provided a subtitled script for the film in the spirit of a fable that ponders the irreducible gaps between living, nonliving, human, animal, technological, and cosmic actors.

Allora & Calzadilla (born 1974, USA and 1971, Cuba) critically address the intersections and complicities between the cultural, the historical and the geopolitical. The interdisciplinary nature of their interventions is echoed by an expanded use of the artistic medium that includes performance, sculpture, sound, video and photography. Their dynamic engagement with the art historical results in an acute attention to both the conceptual and the material, the metaphoric as well as the literal. They both live and work in Puerto Rico.

Heba Y. Amin

As Birds Flying, 2016, 7 minutes

In late 2013, Egyptian authorities detained a migratory stork suspected of espionage due to an electronic device attached to its leg. “As Birds Flying” confronts the absurdity of the media narrative in Egypt that has turned a bird, migrating from Israel to Egypt, into a symbol of state paranoia. The film juxtaposes drone footage of the "spy bird" with reconstructed audio from Adel Imam's iconic film "Birds of Darkness" (1995) which critiques government corruption in Egypt through the opposing perspectives of secular and Islamist parliamentary candidates.

Heba Y. Amin (born 1980, Egypt) is a multimedia artist, researcher, and lecturer. She works with political themes and archival history, using mediums including film, photography, archival material, lecture performance and installation. She is the co-founder of the Black Athena Collective, curator of visual art for the MIZNA journal, and currently sits on the editorial board of the Journal of Digital War. She currently lives and works in Berlin.