by April Lin 林森
Across ancient geologies, oceanic depths and celestial bodies, the seven films in Of Lines And Creases push at the borders and boundaries of perspective.
In Slow Shift, Shambhavi Kaul documents a landscape in Hampi, India, where langur monkeys scuttle, mingle and perch amidst fourteenth century ruins. Combined, animal and rock are in dialogue: a conversation about parallel senses of time and space. In [pa’ljit sj], Ania Mokrzycka transports us to Białowieża Forest, an area crudely split between Poland and Belarus by a concrete and barbed-wire wall. Rejecting nation-state implementations of borders, the film favours modalities of transition, migration, permeability – returning the forest to those that inhabit it fluidly, despite top-down attempts to control and monitor.
In Babbler, Fairy and Thrush, Karel Doing – an Alchemy artist in residence in 2019 – blurs disparate senses of scale, combining the macro and the micro, stasis and motion, to destabilise visual vocabularies of sense-making. An unfiltered and unrestrained abstraction emerges, something unnameable yet more akin to the organic flows of perception. Island of Multitude by Karl Kaisel similarly approaches the filmic medium as an opportunity to communicate a fundamental shift in perspective. Mixing animation, documentary and autoethnography, the film explores the infinite multispecies entanglements of an Estonian islet to challenge any preconception that an island is an isolated entity.
Luminaries by Daphne Rosenthal elevates us to the dancing, animated textures of solar and lunar cycles. As shadows and illuminations are cast and projected across these celestial bodies, the sun and moon become the elemental predecessors of cinema; the original technologies of light. Time and space become fractured, distended, and collapsed once more in Kialy Tihngang’s For Those In Peril On The Sea, where memes, retro-futuristic in-game visuals, and speculative artefacts are employed in a synth-filled meditation on homecoming for enslaved African people. The glitches, pixelations, and digital audiovisual tremolos join forces with the oceanic to form portals to alternate timelines.
Closing the programme, Sebastian Wiedemann’s Hidden composes an atmospheric elegy by collaging glimpses of the sublime, the divine and the unnatural in the everyday. There is something suggestive of an ending here, the feeling of pre-emptive mourning — culminating in a cinematic embrace of poetic uncertainty.
