BEEF Presents: Conspirators of Perception Part 3
This third part of the BEEF Presents programme showcases the work of national and international artists who work within experimental film, experimental documentary and expanded cinema, and each in their own way push the boundaries of the medium.
BEEF Presents: Conspirators of Perception Part 3 will take place at the Watershed Cinema and the Arnolfini Bristol, and is made possible by support from West of England Visual Arts Alliance (WEEVA) and The Brunswick Club.
PROGRAMME OVERVIEW
- Tuesday 28 March 2024, 6.30pm, Watershed – The Commonplace Unravelled: The Films of Tara Najd Ahmadi + Q&A
- Thursday 25 April 2024, 6pm, Watershed – Katrina Daschner: Hiding in the Lights + Q&A
- Thursday 18 July 2024, 7pm, Arnolfini – The films of Lis Rhodes introduced by Ben Cook
The Commonplace Unravelled: The Films of Tara Najd Ahmadi
Tuesday 28th March 2024, 18:30
Watershed Cinema, 1 Canon’s Rd, Bristol BS1 5TX
Book tickets here: Watershed
Listing: Headfirst
Tara Najd Ahmadi is an Iranian artist and filmmaker who creates non fiction, experimental and documentary films.
Her work creates a sense of intimate closeness and at the same time raises alertness towards what lies beneath the layers of daily life. There is a subtle humour, a deliberate lightness of touch in how film after film she delves deeper into conditions in which commonplace is mixed with social and political complexities. She uses different mediums from analogue formats, home movies, segments of cinematic references, direct on film painting and animation techniques. Her narration is casual and intimate like reading a diary. Her short sharp sentences along with the punctuated editing style, leaves us with parcels of thoughts and images. Just as in the game of pass the parcel, we unpack layer upon layer of untold memories, histories and conflicts that are deemed to be too minor to be told, or doomed to be forgotten
The films in this retrospective present her work in the last 12 years. Each film in an indirect way, frames a moment in the recent history. She gives us hints and we are left to follow her lead long after the films are finished.
The screening is followed by a Q&A with Tara Najd Ahmadi moderated by Niyaz Saghari
The films in the screening are:
1- Measuring the Level of Resistance (2011)
2- Three Minutes of a Headless Life (2014)
3- Productive Frustration (2016)
4- A Week with Azar (2018)
5- An Art Historian Recipe (2022)
6- My Sleepless Friends (2023)
7- Surfacing Images (2023)
Hiding in the Lights and Q&A with Katrina Daschner
Thursday 25th April 2024, 18:00
Watershed Cinema, 1 Canon’s Rd, Bristol BS1 5TX
Katrina Daschner was born in Hamburg and since 1995 lives in Vienna working as an artist and filmmaker. Her films and installations are internationally shown in art shows and at film festivals.
Hiding in the Lights (2020) is Katrina Daschner’s first feature length film is the culmination of a series of experimental shorts since 2008. Omitting all dialogue, Daschner creates with the luminence and sound inherent to the filmic medium an erotically charged, visceral and visually obsessive web of bodies, architectural details and fetishised materials. Full of irony and humour, it draws the viewer in to explore their own bodily boundaries and with it the tension between desire, permission and restriction. As a fantasy it is loosely based on Arthur Schnitzler’s Dream novella yet also reflects on early cinema and its links to vaudeville, the fun fair and the burlesque.
The screening is introduced by Ren Scanteni and followed by a Zoom Q&A with Katrina Dashner
The films of Lis Rhodes
Thursday 18th July 2024, 19:00
Arnolfini, 16 Narrow Quay, Bristol BS1 4QA
A screening of Lis Rhodes’ films, spanning four decades of her practice and encapsulating her concerns with patriarchy, power, surveillance, military control and the language of cinema and media through which this is represented.
Using animation rostrum techniques, Light Reading restlessly scans and scrutinises torn fragments of overlaid drawings, photographs and letters, building a restricted view on a domestic scene. Present throughout, Rhodes’ voice is a counter rhythm to the visual clues as she narrates complexities of representing female subjectivity.
Continuing with the aesthetic of searching through layers of artworks and documents, Cold Draft also points a lens outwards to capture uninhabited, blighted industrial landscapes. The bleak atmosphere is compounded by the foreboding in Rhodes voice as she narrates existence under a neo liberal apparatus of oppression of Orwellian proportions.
To a greater degree even than the earlier works, this film seems to investigate the power of abstract animated forms to connote violence. A lexicon of bold geometric overlapping black and white shapes suggests an oppressive apparatus of restricted movement and a sense of entrapment, made doubly stark by Rhodes spoken dirge detailing the dire economic conditions and dehumanising of, what is now termed,the global majority. Yet here also is beauty and a glimpse of hope as the mesh briefly ruptures, the voice lifts, the poetry soars.