Project 88 is pleased to announce its tenth exhibition in affiliation with Artists’ Film International (AFI). Established by the Whitechapel Gallery in 2003, AFI is a collaborative project with 22 global partner organizations featuring film, video, and animation from around the world. Each organization nominates an exciting recent work by an artist from their region, which is shared amongst the network. This year, AFI selections respond to the theme of ‘Diaspora’, foregrounding an urgency to rethink notions of belonging and identity in relation to our contemporary geopolitical landscape.
The word ‘Diaspora’, at its very onset, indexes a deeper concern – of identity, geography, and belonging – for before we categorize the displaced, dispossessed, and those in-transit, perhaps, we ought to take a step back, and ask: what parameters determine our identity itself? And who gets to decide what this should look like? As we grapple with the ever-present and looming threat of catastrophe justified on the premise of (re)making human borders, haunting our collective future, the fatal consequences of this contingent relation – territory and identity – demand an urgent and careful analysis. If our sense of belonging is forged solely by land – a place, a home – what happens when it unexpectedly disappears, disintegrates, or morphs into property of an unknown stranger? If you are out of place, are you no longer at home?
For AFI 2023, we present a curation of five films by artists’ across the globe, each reckoning with the ways in which we construct (and dismantle) our own fraught identity in relation to an external ‘other’ – be it disappearing homelands, indigenous landscapes, capitalist ideology, or even the making of collective histories. But why does this even matter today? To begin with, Sashko Protyah’s film My Favourite Job exhumes the immense (and concrete) stakes of an identity threatened with territorial conflict, at the ebb of a deliberate erasure. In 2022, Protyah’s home city, Mariupol, was invaded by Russian troops, marking the onset of the ongoing and truly debilitating Russia-Ukraine war. Here, an experimental film documents a volunteer group that evacuated Ukrainian civilians from their site of trauma, their own homes, and inevitably lingers on newly composed makeshift routines, the banal (even absurd) fragments of humanity inscribed into a spectacle of war. Protyah’s film extrapolates the paradoxical core of a contemporary catastrophe: at one moment, it appears overwhelming, even impossible to fathom, yet in another, it becomes terrifyingly ordinary, a new ‘normal’ with no end on the horizon. Whereas Protyah’s film deploys the trope of vehicles – cars, buses, trains – as a motif of bare survival, Adnan and Nina Softic’s film takes us into the dark abyss of a deep sea. In Ships with goods and materials from all over the world bump the Bibby Challenge with their waves notions of impermanence, precarity, and fluctuating spheres unsettle your gaze. This short film focuses on a refugee residential ship in Hamburg, perpetually on the move, and explores an unrequited desire for solid ground – the futile quest of migrants seeking their identity to be validated by the state. For in the absence of legal documents to recognize their presence, do they even exist in an increasingly nationalist world?
On the other hand, Jesse Chun’s film O dust thinks through a different forms of historic erasure by looking at the institutional apparatus of Eurocentric translation and historiography to uncover alternate, even intimate poetics that resist such bureaucratic narratives. Filmed at the UNESCO headquarters in Paris, inside the Intangible Cultural Heritage archives, Chun pauses at the empty conference rooms, walking through the interpreter’s booths and machines, and ruminates on her diasporic relation to language, heritage, and the intangible. Her film summons an unanswered question: How can we archive the intangibility of our own past selves? Can we document the unspoken, that which resists formal language, which cannot be translated into words? Chun’s non-linear film oscillates between moving image poetry, an imaginary multilingual folklore, and an abstract letter to her late grandmother – a former Korean folk dancer. The static concrete façade of a bureaucratic office is repeatedly juxtaposed with shadows of fluctuating and ever shifting waters beyond our reach; and this conceptual tension between inevitable movement and absolute stillness becomes the key motif of her film.
In a sharp contrast, R.I.P Germain looks at the flip side of erasures, into its extreme (but all too real) antagonist: out here, identity is hyper-recognised and transformed into a commodity, a fetishized object that can be sold, bought or traded, and in this process, is often irrevocably crushed. In Everything’s For Sale & Everyone’s Welcome To Buy a viewer is transported into the iconic and the fringe of Black culture – from hip-hop and rap cultural icons, music videos, to gun violence in the form of a simulated reality video game. Here we get obscured and challenging slices of reality – each clip is a false front, and you can make multiple conjectures on their meaning. Both a trickster and guide, R.I.P Germain dances a fine line: making work that speaks to deeper and darker truths Black lived realities without flattening them out for easy consumption. Ultimately, to conclude our screening, Mochu indexes an anomalous crash site of philosophy where online subcultures, cyberpunk ruins and imperial nostalgia arrange themselves into a prismatic history full of memory errors, discognitions, and techno-utopian fantasies. In GROTESKKBASILISKK! MINERAL MIXTAPE a viewer encounters a simulated ruin of our current homeostatic reality – all that was concrete and absolute is rendered disjointed, disrupted, and strikingly surreal. Glinting through Mochu’s conceptual wreckage is a peculiar anti-egalitarian map of time, closely allied to the genre tactics of science fiction and horror, as well as the managerial protocols of big tech. Out here, we are all aliens, and rather than resorting to nostalgic laments for a pre-catastrophic time of the past, Mochu pushes viewers to leap into the absurd and imagine anew.
- Sonali Bhagchandani