by Michael Pattison
In This Part Of Me Which Is You, seven films sculpt meaning from the space between worlds – from the spiritual to the folkloric, the colonised to the diasporic, the meteoric to the transcendent.
In Asteroid, Lars Koens presents an object of unidentified origin, suspending it against an outer space-like emptiness so that its depths and dimensions recall the mysterious, uncanny textures of early cinema – and its curiosity for distant worlds. In Here We Are, Chanasorn Chaikitiporn reflects on the insidious power of cinema, constructing a complex, epistle-led account of Thailand’s relationship to the USA during the Cold War – perusing archives both personal and propagandistic, and uncovering the historically entrenched colonial underpinnings of presentday Bangkok.
Maya Jeffereis’s Fields Fallen from Distant Songs also traces colonial legacies in present-day landscapes; condensing time and blurring tenses through a range of formal techniques, the artist accumulates a powerful, elegiac meditation on – and dialogue with – her great-grandparents’ experience as Japanese immigrant labourers in Hawaii. In Dear F…, another epistolary exploration of ancestry, Hannan Jones locates knowledge and identity in an Algerian barbershop in Glasgow – and the framed football memorabilia with which it is decorated – a place in which tonsorial transformation plays out as a metaphor for community.
In Coast to Coast (Preamble), Zeyuan Ren finds himself in active search of a narrative framework in which his longing for home can manifest: stranded as a Chinese international student on the USA’s west coast due to prohibitive quarantine measures during lockdown, he too communicates in dialogue – deploying a lyrical, second-person address to ruminate on liminality in the context of historical and geographic specificity.
In producing the liminal excursions of Kraina – The Land on the Edge, Marta Adamowicz and Robert Motyka collaborated with Edinburgh’s Polish communities to give animated form to myths from Slavic folklore – resulting in a dreamy, dialogue-free film that proceeds through multiple tonal registers to explore notions of home, discovery and reconnection. In House of Victories, Matt Feldman and Shirine Shah play with language as the framework through which identity and reality are constituted, combining an English-language voiceover with Urdu text to explore the space between memories – and the colours that linger after language too disappears.
