Dreaming the End by Sin Wai Kin, 2023
Jarman award nominee Sin Wai Kin states: ‘I use speculative fiction and fantasy in order to try and reimagine our relationship with our bodies and our bodies’ relationships to the world and to each other. I try to offer up alternative ways of existing. I try to question binaries and categories.’ The film Dreaming the End does this by following two characters as they transform and travel through parallel universes and parallel selves. Work by the Jarman award nominees is on tour across the UK until 1 December 2024
Photograph: © Sin Wai Kin
The Breaking Story by Sin Wai Kin, 2022
Sin Wai Kin: ‘The Breaking Story is a six-channel video installation which features news presenters that are broadcasting from alternate realities where different things are true. The work is focusing on the binaries of fantasy and reality and performance and authenticity. It’s about the construction of truth and who gets to define what’s real and what’s not and thinking about the role of news presenter as a contemporary storyteller’
Photograph: © Sin Wai Kin
With Horses by Maeve Brennan, 2023
With Horses by nominee Maeve Brennan is a rumination on life and death in a damaged world. The installation shows a dying horse and a newborn foal in the midst of a landscape of plastic waste, addressing the temporality of the industrial age. The use of fossil fuels for cheap synthetic plastics has produced a throwaway culture worldwide through economic globalisation. Its toxic residue is distributed throughout the planet and deposited in the Earth’s soil. In two long shots we see a newborn foal and his mother in the alluvial land of a dam in Burkina Faso
Photograph: © Maeve Brennan
The Drift by Maeve Brennan, 2017
‘With regard to my process, people are at the centre of my work,’ says Brennan. ‘And throughout my process I’m trying to remain open to sort of chance encounters, allowing them to inform and shape the work’s direction. And so I think this is somehow an attempt to not pre-empt what the film will be, and in a sense be responsive to the world that I encounter there’
Photograph: © Maeve Brennan
The Invisible Worm by Rosalind Nashashibi, 2024
Nominee Rosalind Nashashibi’s work is brimming with the joy and physicality of her analogue film medium. The film, in three parts, is an exploration of non-linear time and corruption. It looks at the mythology of an artist, while also addressing corruption on the personal, corporate and governmental level
Photograph: Courtesy the artist
Wayfinder by Larry Achiampong, 2022
‘I’m really interested in what identity means,’ says nominee Larry Achiampong. ‘Not simply in relation to history, but with regards to the digital age, this ability to create multiple versions or even facets of oneself. And with that in mind, I explore various aspects of popular culture, whether that be popular films, B-movie type stuff, histories of gaming or music’
Photograph: Courtesy of the artist, Lux, DACS & Copperfield London
A Pledge by Larry Achiampong, 2024
Achiampong continues: ‘In the case of the film A Pledge, I’m thinking about the relationship that I have with my son as he grows into a young adult. A deeper aspect of the film is a sequence in which myself and my son are sparring within a blackened infinity space. We’re engaging in a close-quarter combat style called Gōjū-ryū. And the philosophy of Gōjū-ryū, which translates to “hard, soft style”, has a great significance towards life and balance’
Photograph: Courtesy of the artist, Lux, DACS & Copperfield, London
Mast del by Maryam Tafakory, 2023
Two women lie together in bed in nominee Maryam Tafakory’s film Mast-del. As the wind bashes against the window, one recalls a past date to the cinema. The narrated scene cannot be conveyed through images. Layers of found and original footage are superimposed to fill in some of the cracks. Mast-del is about forbidden bodies and desires inside and outside post-revolution Iranian cinema. This film guides us away from the codes of censorship towards the unseen, the neglected pleasures and the resistance of bodies erased within and beyond the silver screen
Photograph: © Maryam Tafakory
CodeNames-II by Maryam Tafakory, 2023–24
Revisiting films made in Iran after 1979, CodeNames is an archival search for the unspoken – a search for forgotten names, for forbidden bodies, for women’s disappearances both on and off the screen
Photograph: © Maryam Tafakory
Golden Girls by Melanie Manchot and Andrew Schonfelder, 2023
Fellow nominee Melanie Manchot’s work spans film, video, photography and sound, delving into the processes that contribute to our individual and collective identities. Her projects investigate and use actions of caring, resistance and communality to engage in discussions about social and political urgencies. Performance-to-camera, reconstruction and involvement, as well as location-based research, are all common approaches in her work
Photograph: Courtesy Galerie m, Bochum, Germany
Liquid Skin by Melanie Manchot and Andrew Schonfelder, 2023
The film Liquid Skin focuses on nine women who work at night. They take us on a meandering trek through Germany’s post-industrial landscape. They work as bakers, nurses, wrestlers, construction workers and pole dancers. ‘The work is quite invested in a female perspective and in a female gaze,’ says Manchot. ‘And the gendered experience of the workplace and the gendered experience of night time is still very much different for men and for women. It’s about giving people agency.’ The Jarman award winner will be announced in late November
Photograph: Courtesy Galerie m, Bochum, Germany
English (US)