ARCHIVAL FABULATIONS
Film screening and panel discussion
ARCHIVAL FABULATIONS
Film screening and panel discussion
Films by:
Nafis Fathollahzadeh
Onyeka Igwe
Hope Strickland
Curated by Mariana Cunha & Marianna Tsionki
Discussion with the curators moderated by Daniel Grúň
6 pm, tranzitsk, Beskydská 12, Bratislava
The event will be held in English.
The screening programme aims to untangle the pervasiveness of colonial violence in collecting practices and cultural heritage, and engage with ideas of care, repair and social justice. Deploying archival materials, the films included in the programme aim to deconstruct the colonial foundations of cultural institutions. Moving images have always been at the forefront of documenting collections of objects and artefacts —be that museum collections, archival materials or cultural practices. More recently, contemporary moving image artists have drawn on this documenting-classification-displaying impulse to propose new ways of looking at cultural and institutional practices. Departing from three moving image works, the programme addresses the potentialities of archival materials as artistic and curatorial resources to confront colonial extractive practices and reimagine the future social relevance of museums.
Beyond thinking about the collection objects and institutional infrastructures of the archives as agents of collective human memory, the films propose new ways of thinking through ideas of reparation and restitution in response to traumatic legacies of coloniality. The programme and post-screening conversation will develop a constructive critique of colonial attitudes in modern museology addressing forms of extractivism, cultural appropriation and the practice of smuggling, as well as methodologies of decolonial repair.
PROJECTED FILMS:
Hope Strickland: I’ll be back!, 2022
10 mins 54 sec
Filmed in archives and museums across the UK, I’ll Be Back! explores a series of collections holding objects of colonial violence. Shifting across digital, 16mm and archival formats, the film interrogates institutional collecting practices and reconsiders the distances between myth, history and machinations of power.
Nafis Fathollahzadeh: Khabur, 2023
30 mins
The film addresses photography and archaeology as two disciplines emerging from the colonial-imperial enterprise, critically engaging with the imperial grammar of institutionalized archives, and examining the way it could be recycled, reimagined, and rehearsed.
Onyeka Igwe: a so-called archive, 2020
20 mins
Blending footage shot in two colonial archive buildings—one in Lagos, Nigeria, and the other in Bristol, United Kingdom—the film is a double portrait of the enduring visual, sonic, and psychic imprint that colonial images continue to generate, despite the disintegration of matter and memory. The film provokes timely questions around the power of the archive, engaging the potential of contemporary art to address complicated histories of imperialism and cultural extractivism at the heart of colonial practice, which often shape institutional structures as well.
BIOS OF PARTICIPANTS:
Nafis Fathollahzadeh is a Berlin-based visual artist and researcher from Iran. They work at the intersection of artistic research, video art and photography. They were a fellow researcher in the Rosa Luxemburg scholarly program on Authoritarianism and Counter Strategies and affiliated with EUME: Forum Transregionale Studien in Berlin. They are art director and co-editor of Momentography of a failure, a multidisciplinary artistic and urban research platform for collaborative thinking, artistic collaborations, digital mapping and publishing. Their films were premiered at BFI, Doclisboa, Vienna Shorts, Dokumentarist, Duisburger Filmwoche, Prismatic Ground, Golden Apricot among others.
Onyeka Igwe is a London born & based moving image artist and researcher. Her work is aimed at the question: how do we live together? – pulling apart the nuances of mutuality and co-existence in our deeply individualized world. Onyeka’s practice figures sensorial, spatial and counter-hegemonic ways of knowing as central to that task. She is interested in the prosaic and everyday aspects of black livingness. Her work has screened at Modern Mondays, MoMA, Artists’ Film Club: Black Radical Imagination, ICA, London; Dhaka Art Summit 2020, and at film festivals internationally including the London Film Festival; Open City Documentary Film Festival, Rotterdam International; Images Festival, and the Smithsonian African American film festival.
Hope Pearl Strickland is an artist-filmmaker and researcher from Manchester, UK with British-Jamaican heritage. Her work sits at the intersection of experimental film and documentary practices, moving across archival, analogue and digital formats in order to quietly sit across from and outside of time. Hope is interested in how a moving image practice can wrestle with violence, disparate colonial landscapes and attempt to ask how we might live in a world and relate to one another with care whilst amongst and against systems of power and control. Her work has screened internationally at film festivals including the New York Film Festival, BFI London Film Festival and Exis, Experimental Film Festival, Seoul.
Mariana Cunha (BR/UK) is a researcher and lecturer at the University of Westminster. Her theoretical and curatorial research focuses on ecological aesthetic practices in moving image-based art. Mariana holds a PhD in Film (Birkbeck, University of London) and has published in several academic journals, including the co-edited book Human Rights, Social Movements and Activism in Contemporary Latin American Cinema. She has contributed to film festivals and screenings as a film programmer in Brazil and the UK and co-curated the exhibition We Live Like Trees Inside the Footsteps of Our Ancestors (with Marianna Tsionki, Blenheim Walk Gallery, Leeds, 2023).
Marianna Tsionki (GR/UK) is an art theorist and curator working at the intersection of contemporary art, ecology and technology. She is Associate Professor and University Curator at Leeds Arts University. Her curatorial projects and writing have focused on issues of climate change, ecotechnology, globalization, migration, decolonial eco-visualities, and eco-feminism. Among others, she curated the exhibitions The School of Mutants (Blenheim Walk Gallery, Leeds, 2024), We live, like trees, inside the footsteps of our ancestors (Blenheim Walk Gallery, Leeds, 2023, with M.Cunha), Kyriaki Goni: Networks of Trust (SixtyEight Art Institute, Copenhagen, 2022), Marwa Arsanios: Who is Afraid of Ideology? (Blenheim Walk Gallery, Leeds, 2022), Meteorological Mobilities (Apexart, New York City, 2020).
Daniel Grúň is an art historian, curator and writer living and working in Bratislava. He focuses on the theory and history of modern and contemporary art in Central and Eastern Europe, art archives and transregional art history. He currently works as an associate professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bratislava and at the Institute of Art History of the Slovak Academy of Sciences. He heads the Július Koller Society and co-curated the artist’s first international retrospective “Július Koller: One Man Anti Show” at MUMOK in Vienna and Museion in Bolzano in 2015–16. His recent publications and editorial projects include: Daniel Grúň, Christian Höller, Kathrin Rhomberg (ed.), White Space in White Space (Biely pokor na bielom pokore), 1973−1982. Stano Filko, Miloš Laky, Ján Zavarský (Vienna: Schlebrugger, 2021) and Subjective Histories. Self-historicisation as Artistic Practice in Central-East Europe (Bratislava: Veda, 2020).
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The event is part of the Towards Other Possible Artworlds program curated by Judit Angel and Eliška Mazalanová.
ERSTE Foundation is the main partner of tranzit.
Media partners:
Artalk.info, Flash Art CZ & SK,Kapitál, GoOut.net
