The Mini Cinema

Encore (Paradise Omeros, Redux), 2003

Isaac Julien (Great Britain, b 1960)
4:38 min
Vocalist: Hansil Jules

The Atlantic Ocean here becomes a metaphor for Caribbean diasporic identity. To images of waves, tropical vegetation and human vocal chords in movement, poet Derek Walcott reads from Omeros – his Caribbean retelling of The Odyssey. The video weaves Walcott’s voice with Isaac Julien’s split, mirrored imagery of St. Lucia, a country they share ties with, evoking notions of migration and memory.

Mother Tounge Murder, 2022

Meira Ahmemulić (Sweden, b 1974)
7:00 min
Kulning, vocalist: Ingrid Brännström

Ahmemulić prepares tongue in her mother’s way – skinned, seasoned, boiled, sliced. She can then in turn serve her son her mother’s tongue. The skinned lamb tongue here becomes a brutal metaphor for a doubly impossible language – the acquired Swedish and a Serbo-Croatian that has begun to dissolve.

View from Above, 2017

Hiwa K (Kurdistan, Iraq, b 1975)
11:23 min

The camera slowly pans the ruins of a war-torn city. The artist’s voice-over recounts the story of the deserter M, who fled from an area declared a “safe zone” by the UN. A model of the German city of Kassel, destroyed in the Second World War, forms the backdrop for a timeless story of rightlessness and identity loss. The text is a collaboration with Lawrence Abu Hamdan, an artist and writer focusing on the politics of listening.

presentarms, 1963

Åke Hodell (Sweden, 1919–2000)
3:15 min

Åke Hodell’s sound pieces igevär [presentarms] and General Bussig [General Buddy Buddy] marked his shift from more traditional poetry to experimental sound, visual, and performance practices. Emerging alongside Sweden’s movement of concrete poetry as well as the contemporary art scene of the 1960s, igevär exemplifies the neo-avant-garde’s fusion of form and politics, expanding language beyond the page into action, sound, and space.

Anthem, 1983

Bill Viola (USA, b 1951)
11:00 min
Voice: Amy Nomura

Centering on the piercing scream of an eleven-year-old girl at Union Station, Los Angeles, Anthem transforms a primary human sound into a classical seven-note harmonic language. Echoing a ritual chant, the piece reflects on materialism as depicted in a stream of video clips – industry, body, technology. Imagery that seems to hold an abyss – the body’s spiritual divide.

Star, 1994

Jaki Irvine (Ireland, b 1966)
3:30 min
Voice: Anke Dessin
Music: Sergei Prokofiev, Romeo and Juliet

“This is a dry story with a lot of vodka.” Opening with a hazy camera pan over cut glass facets and a sardonic narration, Star examines how a chance encounter is retold and reframed. In Star, Irvine transforms an overheard conversation into a piece of dark visual poetry – an intimate, uneasy study of voyeurism, vulnerability, and broken communication.

Practisse, 1993

Cheryl Donegan (Ireland, b 1967)
6:40 min
Voice: James Joyce reading from Finnegan’s Wake, 1924

To the accompaniment of the only extant recording of Joyce reading from his own work, Donegan uses a clear cellophane hood and a pane of glass to create a series of facial paintings. Joyce’s text depicts a chattering dialogue between two washerwomen who as night falls transform into a tree and a stone. The performance is intercut with the artist repeatedly painting over her own image and starting over.

Ambien Asparagus, 2008

Jordan Wolfson (USA, b 1980)
3:20 min

Jordan Wolfson’s video turns language into a physical force that does not merely describe objects but presses against them, distorts them, and animates their meanings. In Ambien Asparagus the mechanical voiceover and the camera’s slow zoom – speech and image form a tense loop in which words seem to at once to generate, misread, and destabilise the things they name.