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LOBBY > FULL PROGRAMME > LIVE SCHEDULE > DISCUSSION EVENT: A = A

THURSDAY 29 APRIL
13:00 – 16:15 BST

Registration required – please register for this event here

In partnership with Stuart Croft Foundation, Alchemy Film & Arts hosts A = A, a discussion event examining questions of repetition, duration and the loop in artists’ moving image.

Inspired by the late Stuart Croft’s concept of circular storytelling, the event will work through questions and provocations relating to the ways in which ideas of repetition, duration and cyclicality inform assumptions integral to the structural organisation of life under capitalism – and to the reproduction of capitalism itself. 

Featuring talks by four artists – Panteha Abareshi, Rebecca Jane Arthur, Jennifer Martin and Hogan Seidel – the event marks a year since the first, and what was wrongly assumed would be the only, online edition of Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival. 

A = A is a special iteration of Questions, an online season of events delivered by Stuart Croft Foundation inviting artists, curators, researchers and writers working with artists’ moving image to discuss the process of thinking and making behind their projects. stuartcroftfoundation.org

This event will take place via Zoom and will include near verbatim live captions.

PANTEHA ABARESHI
Panteha Abareshi’s work is rooted in their existence as a chronically ill/disabled body existing with multiple medical illnesses, at the root of which is sickle cell zero beta thalassemia – a genetic blood disorder that causes debilitating pain and bodily deterioration, both of which increase with age.

Through their work, they aim to discuss the complexities of living within a body that is highly monitored, constantly examined, and made to feel like a specimen. Their body is the primary medium in their practice, and these materials become vital to the visual language of their work. Currently, they are contemplating the prosthesis, and simultaneous abstraction and mechanisation of the fundamentally inorganic ‘body’.

Panteha’s film Natural Disaster screens on loop during the festival as part of our exhibition, A Thing That Holds Something Else.

Images: Panteha Abareshi | Natural Disaster, Panteha Abareshi, 2019

REBECCA JANE ARTHUR
Rebecca Jane Arthur is a visual artist working predominantly with the moving image and writing. Her works revolve around portraits of people and places, and her interest lies in how personal stories depict a socio-political context and history. She recently exhibited her work at ARGOS (Brussels); Beursschouwburg (Brussels); Centre Wallonie-Bruxelles (Paris); Convent (Ghent); Courtisane Festival (Ghent); Punto de Vista (Pamplona); Size Matters (Vienna); Tallinn Photomonth: Contemporary Art Biennial; 25FPS (Zagreb); WIELS (Brussels), among others. 

Arthur is co-founder of the Brussels-based production and distribution platform Elephy and contributor to the Belgian online film agenda Sabzian. Parallel to her artistic practice, she works in Brussels at Auguste Orts as project coordinator of the Creative Europe-funded project On & For Production and Distribution (2018 – 2021).

Rebecca’s film Liberty: an ephemeral statute screens as part of our Spotlight strand at 3pm on Friday 30 April.

Images: Rebecca Jane Arthur | Liberty: an ephemeral statute, Rebecca Jane Arthur, 2020

JENNIFER MARTIN
Jennifer Martin is a British/American artist-filmmaker based in London and winner of the 2018 Stuart Croft Foundation Education Moving Image Award. Her work explores the performativity of belonging and instability of images; these interests manifest in a mix of narrative and experimental pieces. Martin has exhibited and screened work in the UK and abroad with recent solo exhibitions and commissions at Primary (Nottingham), Turf Projects (London), and Cypher BILLBOARDS (London).

Recent screenings include RIDM (Montréal), B3 Biennial of the Moving Image (Frankfurt), LUX (London), Videoclub’s Selected X (UK/touring), and European Media and Art Festival (Osnabrück). She was selected for the 2019/20 FLAMIN (Film London) Fellowship. Martin is co-director of not/nowhere, a Black-Led artist workers’ cooperative focusing on analogue film.

Jennifer’s film TEETH screens as part of the shorts programme A Counterchange of Saltires at 3pm on Sunday 2 May, and is also available with audio description for blind and partially sighted audiences throughout the festival.

Images: Jennifer Martin | TEETH, Jennifer Martin, 2020

HOGAN SEIDEL
Hogan Seidel is a transgender interdisciplinary media artist working in the traditions of experimental film, photochemical abstraction, and collage. They examine queer, southern, religious identity through the plastic medium of celluloid. Torn from the swamps of Florida, Hogan now resides in Boston where they live with their partner and dog, Meatloaf. They are currently Affiliated Faculty at Emerson College’s School of Visual and Media Arts.

Hogan’s practice is based on the integrity of the filmic medium. Inspired by the texts of the bible, the aesthetics of religious iconography, and the hope of reaching out to the divine, their work focuses on what truths lie in the cracks between emulsion, what awareness comes from chemical abstraction, and what hope is birthed form flecks of silver halide distributed across acetate, puncture by a machine, photons pressed through it.

Hogan’s film The Backside of God screens as part of the shorts programme Present Residual at 12.30pm on Sunday 2 May.

Images: Hogan Seidel | The Backside of God, Hogan Seidel, 2020

Title image: TEETH, Jennifer Martin, 2020

LOBBY > FULL PROGRAMME > LIVE SCHEDULE > DISCUSSION EVENT: A = A