BEK Opening Week: Films
Published
Please join us for a film programme at Bergen Kjøtt! The BEK team presents films that inspire us and mark some of our research interests – by Ayoung Kim, Karrabing Film Collective, Josèfa Ntjam, and Rory Pilgrim.
Sunday 26 February
Bergen Kjøtt, Skutevikstorget 1
Doors open at 18:00; screening starts at 18.15
Free and open for all (no registration required!)
Ayoung Kim: “Delivery Dancer’s Sphere” (2022), 25 min
En Storm is a female delivery rider who works for a platform called Delivery Dancer in the fictitious Seoul. In this fiction, Seoul is a labyrinth of endlessly regenerating routes, and the Dancers (workers of Delivery Dancer) pursue neverending delivery work under the control of a master algorithm called Dancemaster. This work is not only about the gig economy and platform labour, which have become immensely popular in South Korea especially during the pandemic, but also about the topological labyrinth, the possible world(s), the hypervigilance, and the accelerationist urge for optimization of body, time and space. It contains hints of a queer relationship with a counterpart from another possible world.
Ayoung Kim synthesizes the outcome of far-reaching speculation, establishing connections between biopolitics and border control, the memory of stone and virtual memory, ancestral origins and imminent futures. These narratives take the forms of video, VR, sonic fiction, image, diagram and text, and are exposed as exhibitions, performances, theatrical projects and publications. Kim idiosyncratically synthesizes geopolitics, mythology, technology, and futuristic iconography, and retroactively collects the speculative time to infiltrate the present. Her interest in synthesis, hybridization, and the coexistence of heterogeneous time led to an interest in all kinds of intersections, transfers, transpositions, and interchanges of time, space, structure, and syntax. http://ayoungkim.com/
Karrabing Film Collective: “The Family” (2021), 29 min
“The Family” (2021) is a film by Karrabing Film Collective enhancing ancestral Emmi narratives about the southern coastal region of the Anson Bay (Northern Territories, Australia), and specifically about the ecologically fragile Cape Ford region. Alternating between contemporary time in which Karrabing members struggle to maintain their physical, ethical and ceremonial connections to their remote ancestral lands, and a future populated by ancestral beings living in the aftermath of toxic capitalism and white zombies, “The Family” mixes comedy, tragedy and realism to reflect on the practices of the present and their impact on worlds to come.
The Karrabing Film Collective are an Indigenous media group, located in the northwest coast of the Northern Territory, Australia. Filmmaking provides a means of self-organization and social analysis for the Karrabing. Screenings and publications allow the Karrabing to develop a local artistic languages and forms and allow audiences to understand new forms of collective Indigenous agency. Their medium is a form of survivance – a refusal to relinquish their country and a means of investigating contemporary social conditions of inequality. The films represent their lives, create bonds with their land, and intervene in global images of Indigeneity. https://karrabing.info/
Josèfa Ntjam: “Dislocation” (2022), 17 min
«In the video ‘Dislocation’, Persona pursues her initiatory journey from the internet(s) spaces to a cave floating into outer space amongst a constellation of asteroid-like shells and fossils – a rocky soft cave, both underwater and interstellar. There, Persona dissolves. As she is subtly inhabited by memories and narratives from her ancestors’ fight for Cameroon’s independence, she loses her gender. The cave’s walls and drops are a window to filmed family archives that end up melting with Persona, whose humanoid envelope has vanished. They lose their body in a puddle that still carries imprints and memories engrammed by water.» – Clelia Coussonnet, curator, art editor and writer
The film is written and directed by Josèfa Ntjam, co-produced by Sean Hart, Nicolas Pirus, Aquatic Invasion Production, Le Palais de Tokyo, & CAC Cincinnati 2022.
Josèfa Ntjam is an artist, performer and writer whose practice combines sculpture, photomontage, film and sound. Her work weaves multiple narratives drawn from investigations into historical events, scientific functions, or philosophical concepts being confronted with references to African mythology, ancestral rituals, religious symbolism and science-fiction. Ntjam graduated from the École Nationale Supérieure d’Art, Paris-Cergy, FR (2017). Her work and performances have been shown in a range of international museums and exhibitions. Ntjam is a member of Paris-based art & research collective Black(s) to the Future. https://blackstothefuture.com/
Rory Pilgrim: “The Undercurrent” (2019–ongoing), 50 min
In a time of climate crisis “The Undercurrent” asks how we deal with such an overwhelmingly global issue on a deeply intimate and personal scale. Filmed in Boise, Idaho in the USA, the film was made with 10 Youth Climate Activists from Boise and small towns from the surrounding area who responded to an online open call. While the climate crisis appears to be the most important theme, the activists explore how climate change interconnects with other aspects of their lives including family, difficulties with religion, friendship, fighting for gender equality and the essential need of a home. Exploring further questions of home, security, shelter, communication and nature, members from the local homeless community from Boise reflect on their experiences.
Rory Pilgrim (Bristol, 1988) works in a wide range of media including songwriting, composing music, film, music video, text, drawing and live performances. Centred on emancipatory concerns, Pilgrim aims to challenge the nature of how we come together, speak, listen and strive for social change through sharing and voicing personal experience. Strongly influenced by the origins of activist, feminist and socially engaged art, Pilgrim works with others through a different methods of dialogue, collaboration and workshops. In an age of increasing technological interaction, Rory’s work creates connections between activism, spirituality, music and how we form community locally and globally from both beyond and behind our screens. https://www.rorypilgrim.com/
Back to the full programme of BEK Opening Week 2023
Images: Stills from “The Family” (2021) by Karrabing Film Collective (1–2); “Delivery Dancer’s Sphere” (2022) by Ayoung Kim (3–4); “Dislocation” (2022) by Josèfa Ntjam (5–6); “The Undercurrent” (2019–ongoing) by Rory Pilgrim (7–8).