London Jarman Award 2024
Film
Film London Jarman Award 2024
2 Welcome
4–5 Larry Achiampong
6–11 Hitting Hard, Soft Absorption: The Philosophy of Balance in Larry
Achiampong’s GH0ST_DATA_ Series
Kaitlene Koranteng and Jessica Wan
12–13 Maeve Brennan
14–19 Full of missing links: On Maeve Brennan’s An Excavation
María Palacios Cruz
20–21 Melanie Manchot
22–27 Night Work: On Melanie Manchot’s Liquid Skin
Mimi Howard
28–29 Rosalind Nashashibi
30–35 It helps to think together: On Rosalind Nashashibi’s The InvisibleWorm
Emily LaBarge
36–37 Sin Wai Kin
38–43 Names in the Clearing: On Sin Wai Kin’s Dreaming the End
Maxi Wallenhorst
44–45 Maryam Tafakory
46–53 unruly desire, unruly frame: On Maryam Tafakory’s
Nasrin Himada
54 About the Jarman Award
55 Jarman Award 2024 Tour Schedule
Welcome
Adrian Wootton OBE Chief Executive of Film London & the British Film Commission
Now in its seventeenth year, we are thrilled to present the Film London Jarman Award 2024, inspired by visionary filmmaker Derek Jarman. This year’s Award spotlights the six incredible shortlisted artists and their innovative and boundary-pushing practices. It has been 30 years since the death of Derek Jarman, yet his spirit of experimentation and imagination remains an inspiration to artists and audiences today.
A nationwide touring programme, presented in partnership with a variety of our leading UK cultural venues, has been curated to bring artists’ moving image to audiences across the UK and beyond. Culminating in a two-day programme at London’s Whitechapel Gallery, this tour provides opportunities for art and film lovers to explore the work of the distinguished shortlisted artists. As Film London celebrates its 20th anniversary year, I am immensely proud of our role in discovering and developing some of the UK’s most exciting filmmakers. We have a legacy of championing ground-breaking talent and the Film London Jarman Award is central to our support of artist filmmakers.
I would like to congratulate all six shortlisted artists and thank our funders, Arts Council England, for their vital support, as well as our venue touring partners and the Whitechapel Gallery. Enormous thanks also go to the FLAMIN team, whose expertise and dedication have made the tour and Award possible.
Shortlisted artists
Larry Achiampong
Melanie Manchot
Sin Wai Kin
Maeve Brennan
Rosalind Nashashibi
Maryam Tafakory
Photography credits (top left to bottom right):
Reece Straw, Amy Gwatkin, Melanie Manchot, National Portrait Gallery, Holly Falconer, Maryam Tafakory
Larry Achiampong
Larry Achiampong’s projects employ imagery, aural and visual archives, live performance, and sound to intricately explore the complexities of class, cross-cultural dynamics, and postdigital identity. By crate-digging the echoes of history, Achiampong examines the hybridity of his heritage alongside the intersection between popular culture and the legacies of colonisation. These investigations scrutinise constructions of ‘the self’ through the splicing of audible and visual materials of personal and interpersonal archives. In doing so, he offers multiple perspectives that reveal the deeply entrenched inequalities in contemporary society.
A Letter (Side B) (2023)
4K digital video, 20 mins
A Letter (Side B) looks at the affective impact of history, immigration and geographical separation on two brothers living in Britain and Ghana. The film collapses time, exploring how the past interrupts and impacts in the present and incorporates recent footage filmed by Achiampong in Ghana as well as archival footage from The Museum of African Art: The Veda and Dr Zdravko Pečar Collection in Belgrade, Serbia.
A Letter (Side B) is co-commissioned by The Mosaic Rooms, Stanley Picker Gallery, Kingston University and Heart of Glass. Courtesy of the artist, LUX, DACS, Copperfield, London.
Hitting Hard, Soft Absorption: The Philosophy of Balance in Larry Achiampong’s GH0ST_DATA_ Series
Kaitlene Koranteng and Jessica Wan
‘This series of films has been the most difficult and challenging to make, because I’m literally confronting myself in the mirror. I can still see the persistent threads of depression I’ve experienced—and continue to experience. It’s not something that has disappeared; it’s still very much present. Suicidal ideation is real. It’s not like I woke up in the Royal London Hospital 13 years ago and had an epiphany that suddenly ‘saved’ me. It’s something I deal with daily, a constant struggle. I think of my friend who passed away during the pandemic, and it’s an ever-present reminder’.
— Larry
Achiampong
A Black man is sitting in a room, a pixelated figure in shades of blue, green, and black – all the colours of a bruise – and like a bruise, the man is in pain. A smartly dressed white counsellor
conducts an assessment, and in distress, the man asks, ‘Are you here to help me?’ The counsellor, unconcerned, responds, ‘If you cooperate, I am here to help you’. A mantra repeats in the background: ‘Maybe I should be sent away’. The threat of being sectioned looms, an action outlined by the Mental Health Act (1983)1 which allows for the detention and treatment of a patient without their consent, stripping them of their social and medical rights. This scene has played out countless times – human beings, mentally and physically trapped, treated as disposable. Often, those misunderstood are cast away, people who have lived in survival mode, unable to escape fear.
How do we find hope in such darkness? In A Letter (Side B) (2023), Achiampong recounts a deeply personal moment following a suicide attempt in a counselling room, offering a raw portrayal of his mental health struggles. The story unfolds against a backdrop of structural inequalities that historically marginalised communities continue to face today. One such example is the inequitable treatment of Black men in mental health institutions. In 1991, an inquiry into the death of Orville Blackwood2, a Jamaican-born British man at Broadmoor Hospital, Berkshire, revealed that Black people were more likely to be admitted to psychiatric hospitals with police involvement, receive higher doses of medication, and be subjected to blatant institutional racism.
Following images of landscapes and a game of ludo overlaid like memories, at the heart of this work is Achiampong’s strained relationship with his brother, born in Ghana and separated from him by restrictive immigration policies. This personal reflection on the familial bonds broken by external forces, such as systemic injustice, conveys a longing for a connection that circumstances have denied. A collage of archival and contemporary symbols plays out on the screen, and despite the sorrow, a message of hope emerges – ‘I want to be held; to trust that the hands embracing me will not let me fall.’ Isn’t that what we all seek in the end? To be held in our most vulnerable moments, lifted despite the structural barriers that suffocate us?
The film also connects the treatment of Black people in mental health institutions with the deep-seeded roots of colonialism. In that same tangle are poverty and class struggle, especially among migrant communities seeking refuge in the very place that often contributes to their displacement. In another betrayal, the colonial superpowers that exploited these nations have created hostile immigration laws, perpetuating cycles of harm.
A Letter (Side B), alongside A Pledge (2024), are part of Achiampong’s ongoing GH0ST_DATA_ series, a semiautobiographical exploration of depression and Black masculinity. In both works, a hacked Game Boy camera is used to film the opening sequence, evoking a nostalgic yet distorted representation of memory and emotion, and the fragmented nature of familial relationships. The theme of memory is ingrained in Achiampong’s practice and the title of this project, inspired by the concept of ‘ghost data’ in video games – particularly in time trials, where a player races against a ghostly vision of their previous performance. Through these works the importance of learning from the past to do better is offered; A Letter (Side B) and A Pledge asks how we might use the past to prepare for the future and break repetitive cycles of trauma.
In A Pledge, Achiampong is shown as a driver, tight-fisted and alone in his car, gazing out at the street as he recalls his father and their complicated relationship. Through this lens, the film highlights the toll of immigration and displacement on his family, particularly the struggles his father faced during a
military coup in Ghana. The latter half of A Pledge features a physical and philosophical engagement between Achiampong and his son through Goju-ryu arate, using the practice of randori 3 as a metaphor for the hard and soft elements of life and relationships. In his exploration of the familial bonds between father, son and brother, Achiampong presents a vulnerability that Black men are often taught to shy away from in society. Achiampong’s engagement with Black masculinity shows how a willingness to be vulnerable is strength by another name.
These two films offer a deeply personal, honest and nuanced reflection of mental health, a subject rarely met with openness in public forums. In the shedding of mental health stigma, Achiampong speaks out to the world to hold on to your loved ones, and even when everything feels hopeless, when you lose sight of who you are; go back, and find yourself.
1 UK Department of Health, Mental Health Act 1983: Code of Practice, revised and updated (TSO: Norwich, 2015).
2 Herschel Albert Prins, Report of the Committee of Enquiry into the death in Broadmoor Hospital of Orville Blackwood and a review of the deaths of two otherAfro-Caribbean patients: “Big, black and dangerous?” (Special Hospitals Service Authority, 1993).
3 Randori [乱取り] is a term used in Japanese martial arts to describe free-style practice, and can be translated as ‘taking control of chaos’.
About the writers
Katilene Koranteng is an archivist, engagement producer and poet, with an interest in exploring marginalised histories and access to archives.
Jessica Wan is a curator and writer working to platform diasporic and transnational narratives. She has produced projects with institutions including iniva, Research Centre for Transnational Art, Identity and Nation (TrAIN), Photofusion, Tate and Sarabande Foundation.
Image credits
Larry Achiampong, A Letter (Side B) (2023), film stills. Courtesy of the Artist, LUX, DACS, Copperfield, London. Cocommissioned by The Mosaic Rooms, Stanley Picker Gallery, Kingston University and Heart of Glass.
A Letter (Side B) (2023) installation view at Stanley Picker Gallery, 2024. © Larry Achiampong. Photography by Reece Straw
Maeve Brennan
Maeve Brennan is an artist and filmmaker based in London. Her practice explores the historical and political resonance of material and place. Working across moving image, installation, sculpture and printed matter, her works excavate layered histories, revealing the unseen structures that determine our lived environment.
An Excavation (2022)
Super 16mm film transferred to HD, 20 mins
An Excavation documents forensic archaeologists Dr Christos Tsirogiannis and Dr Vinnie Norskov’s investigation into three crates of ancient vases, found amongst other looted antiquities in a Geneva Freeport warehouse belonging to disgraced antiquities dealer Robin Symes. Made in the 4th century BC by Apulian artisans, these vases remained buried in tombs for 2500 years before they were clandestinely excavated from their now irrecoverable contexts. The objects’ journeys through the hands of looters, smugglers, restorers and dealers are counterpointed by the hand-painted stories that adorn them.
An Excavation is commissioned by Stanley Picker Gallery, Kingston University.
Full of missing links: On Maeve Brennan’s An Excavation
María Palacios Cruz
Maeve Brennan’s An Excavation (2022) begins with text on screen: ‘In 2014, 45 crates of looted antiquities were discovered at Geneva Freeport. Three of the crates, containing 32 cardboard boxes, were sent to archaeologists to search for criminal evidence.’ What follows over the course of the next twenty minutes is the meticulous reconstruction of an ancient vase – ‘object 16’ – pieced back together from fragments that were likely contained across several of the recovered cardboard boxes. The two archaeologists at work, Dr. Christos Tsirogiannis and Dr. Vinnie Norskov, are not only reconstituting an object; they are also piecing together the evidence of a crime – like forensic detectives in a murder scene.
For these are antique objects looted from tombs, illegally trafficked out of Italy to be sold in the largely illicit international antiquities market. In Italy, where all items of archaeological interest belong to the state, the trade in antiquities has been illegal since 1939 – and yet, ‘the halls of the world’s museums and the living rooms of private collectors are cluttered with artifacts looted from Italian soil’.1 Between
1983-1992, 1,236 red-figure vases from Puglia in southern Italy appeared on the international market, and 863 more turned up in private collections; only a small fraction had documented provenance.
Formally, An Excavation is deceptively simple: one object, two characters, one room. But just like an archaeological dig, the film keeps on revealing layers of meaning, excavating through strata of history, art and mythology. The film’s form closely mirrors the archaeologists’ method, starting with the fragment – close-ups of hands and broken pieces – to slowly uncover a larger picture – the space and the archaeologists at work in wide shot – as the pieces of the vase are puzzled back together.
An Excavation is part of a long-term, and ongoing, collaboration between Maeve Brennan and Christos Tsirogiannis, The Goods (2018-present), which also takes the form of billboards that draw from Tsirogiannis’s digital archive of images of more than 100,000 illicitly traded antique objects, in order to draw attention to the largely invisible –and illegal – antiquities market. That these large billboards are presented outside art institutions which are part of the very same art ecosystem that feeds from illegal trafficking is not without irony. Artefacts identified by Tsirogiannis as illegally traded have been found at Frieze Masters, London and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, amongst other places. Art institutions are the primary context where Maeve Brennan’s work is presented, forcing a reflection on the part that the museum plays in a colonial extractive history in which the lines between licit and illicit traffic are blurred.
A forensic archaeologist, Tsirogiannis compares himself to a detective à la Sherlock Holmes, looking for ‘what a criminal must have left behind’, what they missed. Clues are to be found in photographs, inscriptions on boxes, police files – even the newspaper sheets used to wrap the artifacts can provide key information. Polaroids, possibly taken by the looters themselves, are often the only record that exists for looted antiquities. They are unique records and they are also unique prints – with no digital traces, no negatives, no third parties required to develop them and print them. Polaroids are instant and singular – not subject to the mechanical reproduction that is the basis of photography itself. They also underline ‘the
clandestine and singular moment of their creation: I was there, and the photograph is the evidence’.2
The task of the archaeologists is to examine, document and note everything, reconstructing the missing links in the trafficking chain. A different kind of ‘excavation’, Tsirogiannis and Norskov have to apply archaeological methods to extract information, to reveal something, perhaps not about the daily lives of ancient peoples but about those of tomb robbers and antiquities dealers. As Vinnie Norskov asks at one point, ‘what if the objects could tell the story?’ Because of the way that the objects were removed, the archaeological context of these artefacts is lost, destroyed by the looters. The work of the archaeologists in An Excavation is to reconstruct it. The aim is reparation, not simply repair.
Brennan’s forensic approach contrasts with the highly romanticised account of the lives of 1980s tombaroli in Alice Rohrwacher’s La Chimera (2023), where the looters are folk heroes whose exploits are celebrated in the songs of local troubadours. But what La Chimera offers us to see is what the forensic archaeologists are attempting to visualise in An Excavation: when and how the artefacts were looted, how, when and where they were laundered, the trafficking chain from tombarolo in Tuscany to collector, with intermediary dealers in Italy and Switzerland. The looted landscapes in La Chimera were the landscapes of Rohrwacher’s childhood and they are also where Brennan’s attention is turning to in the next chapter of The Goods. Over the past two years, she has
been travelling in Puglia, tracing the potential looting sites for the items recovered in Geneva in 2014, looking at the ‘buried histories beneath the surface and the illicit excavations that continue into the present day.’3
Tombaroli robbed graves for their financial gain, working hastily and crudely, inflicting devastating damage on archaeological sites which prevents us from accessing significant sources of information about ancient civilisations. Fortunately, frescoes and wall paintings were often left behind but even when the objects are retrieved, or repaired, their histories – and the histories of the people they related to – are lost.
Brennan films the repaired vase in 16mm film and like the looters’ Polaroids, these 16mm images are a testimony to an encounter (‘I was there, and the photograph is evidence’). But these 16mm images are public, intended to be projected in the open space of the museum, not hidden away in a dealer’s archive. At the end, vase number 16 remains incomplete, and so does the story of the looted vases found at Geneva freeport. There are pieces that will always remain missing, full of missing links.
1 Andrew L. Slayman, ‘Italy Fights Back’, Archaeology, vol. 51, no. 3, May / June 1998, pp. 42-49.
2 Vinnie Nørskov, ‘The Use of Photographs in the Trade of Greek Vases’, in Caspar Meyer and Alexia Petsalis-Diomidis (eds.), Drawing the Greek Vase (Oxford University Press, Oxford: 2023), p. 277.
3 ‘Meet the artists: Maeve Brennan’, interview for The British School at Rome, Online (8 June 2023).
About the writer
María Palacios Cruz is a film curator, writer and educator. She is currently the Director of Open City Documentary Festival in London.
Image credits
Maeve Brennan, An Excavation (2022), film stills. Commissioned by Stanley Picker Gallery, Kingston University
Melanie Manchot
Across film, video, photography and sound, Melanie Manchot’s work pursues enquiries into the processes that lead towards our individual and collective identities. Her projects interrogate and employ acts of care, resistance and communality to engage in discourses on social and political urgencies. Performance-to-camera, reconstruction and participation as well as location-based research are recurring methodologies in her work. Using cameras as organizing principles, works operate on the threshold of documentary and staged events to investigate how fact, fiction and observation offer strategies for speaking about our shifting place in an increasingly mediated world.
Liquid Skin (2023)
4K digital video, Infrared B+W, 5.1 sound, 23 mins
Filmed between dusk and dawn, Liquid Skin follows nine women, all performing night-time labour, including a baker, pole dancer, care worker, and nightclub security worker. Filmed on infrared in single-shot sequences, the film raises questions on gendered experiences of the night, while drawing attention to the hidden labour and backstage rhythms of our contemporary societies.
Liquid Skin is commissioned by Urbane Künste Ruhr, curated by Britta Peters for RuhrDing ‘Sleep’. Courtesy Galerie m, Germany
Night Work: On Melanie Manchot’s LiquidSkin
Mimi Howard
Melanie Manchot’s 23-minute film Liquid Skin (2023) takes place across several sites in the Ruhr region of Germany: a bakery, a club, an auditorium, a villa. Clustered atop coalfields east of the Rhine, the Ruhr valley became essential to West German economic recovery after the Second World War. By the early 1980s, as in the Rustbelt in America or the Midlands, post-war boom (the so-called Wirtschaftswunder or ‘Miracle on the Rhine’) gave way to bust. Growth stagnated, workers were laid off, deindustrialisation tore through cities in the region. Yet, the frozen infrastructures of industry persisted, abandoned and empty – cathedrals of capital’s ambitions and its past lives.
With its opening sequence, Liquid Skin takes these imposing, vestigial sites as its object of examination. Emerging outside of a derelict factory, the camera follows a woman in a white coat into an old engine room covered with graffiti (‘Fuck the Police’ is visible in one corner). Heavy industrial equipment blocks our view of her as the camera curves around a bend, before re-focusing upon the woman, now de-robed and joined
by a dance partner swivelling around a pole. She swings off it and continues downwards into a labyrinth of outdoor passageways. It’s a jolting, potent image. Skin and metal: a juxtaposition of the supposed most feminine and most masculine of trades.
If we live in cities (Liverpool or London, Dortmund or Detroit), we are accustomed to the variety of means deployed so that places such as these get refashioned to new ends – factories are turned into clubs, mansions of industrial barons into
museums, granaries into luxury lofts. (In financial terms, ‘liquidity’ refers to an object’s capacity to be converted into money). As Manchot suggests, the character and category of labour itself has transmogrified in the twenty-first century, too. In the Ruhr’s heyday, it was male workers who were the protagonists of post-war West German economic recovery, spotlit for their work in the coal mines and steel factories. In Liquid Skin, Manchot instead turns her focus to a set of unlikelier protagonists lurking in the shadows: night labourers.
After putting out a call for women night workers, Manchot drew responses from a baker, bouncer, wrestler, pole dancer, firefighter, tram driver, nurse, cleaner, bar worker, and engineer. (In other words, women primarily employed in the so-called ‘non-productive’ or service industries.) The cast was deeply involved with the production process, co-creating the shots and their movements with the director. A similar strategy was deployed in Manchot’s feature-length film STEPHEN (2023), born out of years working with a real-life Liverpool recovery group. In the opening scene, Stephen Giddings plays himself as he auditions for a film about a gambling addict, the Victorian-era criminal Thomas Goudie, subject of the first crime re-enactment film Arrest of Goudie (1901). It is less a deconstruction of the borderlines between fiction and reality than it is a continual test of their porousness.
In Liquid Skin the effect achieved by working with non-professional actors, women playing themselves, is somewhat different. Without the use of typical documentary techniques like talking heads, interviews, or indeed speech in
any form, we are placed within a realism that is fringed with a surreality – a quasi-sleepwalking state. The phantasmagorical feeling in Liquid Skin is enhanced by Manchot’s aesthetic choices. Shot in infrared, and displayed in black and white, the film’s subjects shine brightly against the shadows of these hulking buildings. They walk through their workspaces hauntingly – with familiarity, fondness, and an ironic sense of proprietorship. They are definitively not the owners of these buildings, but they are nonetheless their guardians: their hands graze across bannisters, shift something back into place, tap the ceiling as they walk down stairs.
In each of the ten sequences, Manchot’s camera follows its protagonists via long shots (no cuts or edits) as they move through their cavernous worksites. The durational advantage of the long shot is that our eyes can wander across the physical space; attention is drawn to the magnitude of industry’s aspirations: tall ceilings, neoclassical design, a sprawl of interconnected factories. Manchot’s use of the tracking shot,
whereby a subject’s movements are followed by the camera, is a winking reversal of its role in cinema’s history. Often meant to underscore activity and masculinity, as in the films of Martin Scorsese, Orson Welles, or Quentin Tarantino, its function here is almost inverted. Manchot’s tracking shot emphasizes the women’s interiority amid quiet, still environments. A contemplative mood is bolstered by the sound design with echoing, dripping, and phantom noise from the outside (rain, cheers from a football field, singing).
Liquid Skin is structured around these displacements: outside leaks inside, night bleeds into day, traditionally masculine work is feminized (there’s a dancer’s pole on the factory floor!). The scrambling of place, time, and identity is a reminder of how capital evaporates and confuses those categories in the first place. In his writings on the working-day, Karl Marx – a newspaper writer in the Ruhr region during the 1820s and 30s – continually returned to the subject of night work. For Marx, night labour was a case study in how capitalism tended to disaggregate categories formerly perceived as natural. ‘After capital had taken centuries in extending the working day to its maximum limit, and then beyond it,’ he wrote, ‘all bounds of morals and nature, age and sex, day and night, were broken down.’1 Liquid Skin, without didacticism, thematizes and interprets this breakdown by bringing the character of night work, and the people who perform it, into light.
1 Karl Marx, ‘Chapter 10: The Struggle for a Normal Working Day’, in Capital, vol. 1 (London: Penguin, 1976), pp. 389-90.
About the writer
Mimi Howard is a writer and critic based in NYC. Her writing has appeared in Art Monthly, ArtReview, Another Gaze, boundary 2 review, Parapraxis, Radical Philosophy, and Los Angeles Review of Books. She holds a PhD from the University of Cambridge in History of Political Thought and is currently a postdoctoral ACLS Leading Edge Fellow.
Image credits
Melanie Manchot & Andrew Schonfelder, Liquid Skin (2023), film stills. Commissioned by Urbane Künste Ruhr, curated by Britta Peters for RuhrDing ‘Sleep’. Courtesy Galerie m, Germany
Melanie Manchot & Andrew Schonfelder, STEPHEN (2023), film still. Courtesy STEPHEN FILM Ltd, 2023 Commissioned by Liverpool Biennial. UK distribution: Modern Films
Liquid Skin (2023) installation view at Urbane Künste Ruhr, Witten, Germany. Photography by Henning Rogge / Urbane Künste Ruhr
Rosalind Nashashibi
Rosalind Nashashibi is a London based artist of Northern Irish and Palestinian descent. Working across film and painting, her work chronicles intimate moments of contemporary life with an empathetic and personal approach. Nashashibi is preoccupied with looking, in a way that almost crosses over into the other camp, passing onto the side of the subject in a way that can be disconcerting or funny. Her films are punctuated by manifestations of power dynamics and collective histories. Subjects have included non-nuclear family structures, the multiple versions of the artist myth and chronicling life in Palestine.
The Invisible Worm (2024) 16mm film transferred to HD, 17 mins
The Invisible Worm is a funny/serious film with spontaneous moments of joy, physicality and thinking aloud. The subtext of the film is the mythical persona of the artist, and how artist friends lean in to one another, leading to both innocent and corrupted effects. Nashashibi’s long term collaborator Elena Narbutaitė is the film’s protagonist and co-writer, and other artist protagonists include a male model, Nashashibi’s teenage son Pietro and a cat called Brother Alyosha.
The Invisible Worm is commissioned by Den Frie Centre of Contemporary Art.
It helps to think together: On Rosalind Nashashibi’s The InvisibleWorm
Emily LaBarge
You can’t know what it is, not really, the so-called invisible worm. Not in William Blake’s poem ‘The Sick Rose’, nor its illustrated plate in Songs of Experience (1794). In the drawing that accompanies Blake’s short and famously enigmatic poem about a diseased flower beset by an ‘invisible worm / That flies in the night / In the howling storm’, thorny branches with yellowed leaves curl around the eight-line text written in sinuous amber script. The thwarted bloom of the poem’s title lies red and heavy at the base of the image and a long white grub (very much not invisible) luxuriates in its petals; its head raised with an unmistakeable face that bears an expression of victorious delight. But the visible worm, with its lugubrious visage, is not the invisible worm.
In Rosalind Nashashibi’s film The Invisible Worm (2024), we might think we see the titular larvae in its closing minutes as a ‘hair in the gate’ – the filmic term for a piece of debris that gets stuck to the film gate and thereafter appears as a fixed dark line hovering over the otherwise moving image. About 12 minutes in, a small wiggle of a line flickers quickly over
the forehead of a dark-haired model (the actress Margaret Qualley posing for a Chanel jewellery campaign) in the open pages of a glossy magazine. Like a stray strand of curly mane, it is almost imperceptible until the camera moves down onto another slick ad (blonde Gigi Hadid looking bored for Miu Miu) over which the dark worm stands out crisply against white and then purple, and then begins to move, squiggle, wriggle, inch, squirm, as if the camera lens is a petri dish that holds a living experiment.
And it does. It contains art, friendship, politics, fashion, projection, fantasy, economy, as one of three women who shift in and out of scenes at the centre of the film repeats. ‘Economy…economy’, she says, a word that can mean the interconnected structures of capitalism, but also thrift, spareness, exactitude. ‘Economy’, she says, sitting at a candlelit bar, and trails off, before reciting Blake’s poem in solemn tones as we see more magazine spreads of beautiful faces and luxury goods and the ‘Elegy’ of Benjamin Britten’s 1943 song cycle, Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings, rises and swells in the background. A tenor’s voice, high and sweet, arcs through the lines of the poem – ‘Oh rose, thou art sick…’ – and the slender black line, animated and agile, traverses the celluloid surface as the British Houses of Parliament as seen from the river passes by in the sun. Home of the rotting Albion rose of the day, will these buildings provide a feast for this accident of film, this now visible worm? Or is it a quiet interloper that only the viewer can apprehend, waiting to infiltrate and observe from within?
Some scholars have thought of ‘the invisible worm’ as a reference to the historical ‘wild worm’ or the ‘notturne larva’, invisible spirits mentioned by St. Augustine in his 5th century The City of God, which later became part of Middle Ages and Renaissance demonic lore.1 For the 14th century Italian writer Giovanni Boccaccio, these invisible worms were created by the deity of dreams, Morpheus, to invade the senses of the sleeping, weigh down and oppress, intoxicate and perplex. Two hundred years later, the Swiss physician and alchemist Paracelsus describes the notturne larvae as a disease of the
imagination that transmit passionate fancies from the mind of one person to another. Unaware, the logic of the imagination is perhaps infested by incubi and succubi: we don’t know why we want what we want, we can’t see, not exactly, what we make, we clothe ourselves in personas, or other garb, project into distant figures so that we can, as one of the film’s three female graces says, find ‘a way of thinking next to thinking’. Or, as yet another of the three women (the artist herself, Rosalind, or Rose, but not sick, Rosie) hints at an artist’s desire ‘to catch the work unawares…just to see what it’s doing, to see it’.
To see it, to see her, him, the artist, the artwork, its proxies, is no easy task, and ‘it helps to think together’, says the woman who opens and closes the film. She is the artist Elena Narbutaitė, a regular collaborator of Nashashibi’s, who has dark curly hair, like Nashashibi, and blue eyes, like the sculptor Marie Lund, both of whom also feature in the film (the trio of graces). The three supplant each other in spoken and visual narratives at various junctures: friendship provides the ultimate gift of subtle distance and transformation so difficult to find alone in the studio.
A woman as a woman as a woman as an artist as an artist as an artist, not quite sure what to look at, not quite sure where the real story lies, if story is the right word at all (it’s not). ‘I found small Rosie in the magazine, but the page was coming from somewhere else’, Elena speaks to no one and everyone, at the outset of the film, sitting in bed leafing through the magazine that ultimately produces the worm. She means, perhaps, what seems to be a black-and-white photocopy
from another source stuck between the pages and featuring a woman who we later recognise resembles Nashashibi. But the following pages show roses, too, bright red and white, thriving. ‘And before that I remember seeing Marie at the window in the kitchen’, Elena continues, ‘both not quite themselves and just exactly like they are’.
As the film elapses we see Marie polishing her curved, shining sculptures; Elena beholding them installed in a gallery; Rosalind in her studio (as her son gives a manic tour of new paintings, appropriating the role of the artist with her as his assistant); Elena dancing in an empty space as music pulses in the air (first The Sisters of Mercy and later, Britten); and finally Marie and Rosalind sitting at a table as Elena recites Blake’s poem. At the tangled heart of The Invisible Worm, we see that networks of friends and makers can be resilient tools for thinking with and against the invisible worm, which straddles micro and macro universes – from the studio, filled with encrusted paint tubes, to the heart of the state. ‘His dark secret love / Does thy life destroy’, warns the speaker of ‘The Sick Rose’, describing the invisible worm, but it need not be so. The dark secret is singularity, and it will eat you from the inside until you droop and wilt and fade and disintegrate, dust to dust. This is why artists work every day to make the invisible visible, and truly, it helps to think together, often seems there is no other choice.
1 Michael Srigley, ‘The Sickness of Blake’s Rose’, Blake: An Illustrated Quarterly, vol. 26 no.1 (Summer 1992), pp. 4-8.
About the writer
Emily LaBarge is a Canadian writer living in London. Her essays and criticism have appeared in Granta, the London Review of Books, Artforum, mousse, Bookforum, Frieze, and The Paris Review, among others. She is a regular contributor to The New York Times and 4Columns. Her first book, Dog Days, will be published by Peninsula Press in 2025.
Image credits
Rosalind Nashashibi, The Invisible Worm (2024), film stills. Cinematography by Emma Dalesman and Rosalind Nashashibi. Courtesy of the artist
Sin Wai Kin
Sin Wai Kin brings fantasy to life through storytelling in moving image, performance, writing, and print. Drawing on experiences of existing between binary categories, their work realizes alternate worlds to describe lived experiences of desire, identification and consciousness.
Dreaming the End (2023)
4K digital video, 21 mins
Filmed on location in 2022, Dreaming the End questions the role of storytelling against the historic city of Rome. By referencing classical sculpture and cinematic genres including the Italian Giallo films of the 60’s and 70’s, the film asks: where does authenticity end and performance begin? Who decides this? Dreaming the End interrogates how the repetition and retelling of stories and mythology constructs a collective sense of reality, offering metamorphosis and the possibility of transformed perspectives.
Dreaming the End is commissioned by Fondazione Memmo, Rome, and produced by Mira Productions.
Names in the Clearing: On Sin Wai Kin’s DreamingtheEnd
Maxi Wallenhorst
‘Once there was a name who lived in name with name’. In one version, Sin Wai Kin’s nonlinear film Dreaming the End opens with a book from which names and nouns have been replaced by just the word ‘name’. In the salon of a suffocatingly luscious palazzo, a reader of this book, serving a strikingly feminized look, almost drowns in its repetition: ‘Name. Name. Name. Each other’. A droning noise simmers as though this were a threat when the reader joins a second, husbandcoded character in the dining room to feast on nightmarishly geometrical apples. The latter begins to explain something but again, every single word is the word ‘name’. Name-dropping in its purest form.
In Dreaming the End, the two protagonists themselves remain unnamed but some viewers may recognise them from the ever-expanding universe of Sin’s body of work. With their series Portraits (2023 - ongoing) in mind, for example, one might extrapolate from their elaborately painted faces that the red-haired, aggressively mansplain-y character goes by the name of The Storyteller. The many-eyed reader, wearing
a high femme peroxide wig, is likely called Change. Inspired by Cantonese and Peking opera, the full faces of drag, and cubist costume design, Sin’s characters vibrate with both an enigmatic allegorical force and hyper-specific performative details: the thick texture of make-up on skin, their voices hoarse in careful modulation. Throughout the film, Change and The Storyteller can be seen in different types of drag — at the dinner table however, they clearly reenact the endless monologues and chewing noises of heterosexual dichotomy until they become unbearable. ‘What are you doing?’, Change finally interrupts The Storyteller. ‘I’m telling a story’. ‘Are you describing a reality?’, Change responds, somewhat cheekily. Their exchange makes palpable how the distinction between those names that are brutally applied and those reduced to fiction is a power game.
Change seems to escape their horrible dinner through the arches of a brutally slick façade. A landmark of fascist architecture, the Palazzo della Civiltà Italiana was built in preparation for the 1942 World’s Fair, a celebration of Mussolini that never was. Postwar Italian cinema has often turned to the Palazzo’s anal arches to represent fascism and the way in which it lives on in the country’s fixations. In his contribution to the 1970 anthology film Bocaccio ‘70, for example, Federico Fellini uses Mussolini’s fever dream of militant neoclassicism as a backdrop for Anita Ekberg, who appears as a monstrously voluptuous giantess. Sin, however, contrasts the Palazzo with the even more disturbing, rigorously denaturalized femininity of Change. This seems especially poignant at a historical moment in which Italy’s (supposedly post-) fascist future is, in the hands of prime minister Giorgia Meloni, female.
Dreaming the End was shot over the course of a year in Rome, a place that once glowed with the epithet the eternal city, before the climate catastrophe made such names sound rather antiquated. Rome is so full of names, both aggressively historicized and forgotten, it seems to disorient The Storyteller and Change as they roam the gardens of the Villa Medici. In Civilization and its Discontents, Freud famously describes Rome as an allegory of how, in the unconscious, even what seems to have long since vanished remains eerily tangible: ‘Now let us, by a flight of imagination, suppose that Rome is not a human habitation but a psychical entity with a similarly long and copious past — an entity, that is to say, in which nothing that has once come into existence will have passed away and all the earlier phases of development
continue to exist alongside the latest one’. Curiously, however, Freud soon dismisses this image ‘for it leads to things that are unimaginable and even absurd’.1 Sin’s use of Roman landmarks stays faithful to this absurdity—and takes it one step further. They dare to imagine a kind of clearing at the centre of European iconography, a place where the unimaginable simultaneity of names, future and past, to which Freud alludes, can be more fully articulated. A place relieved, if only for a moment, of the pressure that makes names so categorical. And thus, instead of dutifully representing the ideals that modern story-tellers have projected onto antiquity, the statues in the Medici gardens suddenly begin to tremble with almost comically crude animation. They talk back, despite being headless. ‘The past, the present, and the future’, one of them reminds a curious Change (now donning a dashing suit complete with deconstructed bowtie), ‘are one theatre’.
In intimate conversation with various statues in the gardens, Change and The Storyteller reflect on the messy entanglement of narratives and materiality, in other words, on performativity. ‘Your story is changing my body’, Change observes, and throughout, the film conveys a visceral sense of how painful and exciting that can be. A name might precisely be the device whereby a story changes a body, since names can become an oppressive label or be just a noise. Perhaps this is why the problem of naming is at the heart of contemporary gender politics. Many languages rely on pronouns because names are ultimately the too unwieldy and idiosyncratic, too embodied, to be folded into the casual syntax everyday life requires. The gendered nature of some pronouns speaks
to the ill-fated attempt to make them resonate with the ways in which social inequality is organized. Trans and nonbinary struggles, however, are fighting not only for a new set of names or pronouns, nor merely their abolition. They are demanding a different relationship to the act of naming itself, often aware that this will only be possible through the radical transformation of very material conditions.
The ways in which many people are currently coming up with new names for body parts, intimate relationships, sexual orientations, can sometimes seem silly, overly academic, hyper-specific (and often they are!). At their most strategic and dialectical, however, they also prefigure a world in which a name could name something different entirely: a precision instrument of social relationships rather than a naturalised accident. Performing a subtle dance, The Storyteller gives a visceral account of how alien naming actually feels: ‘I haven’t gotten used to the feeling of the vibrations in my throat or the shapes my mouth is making’. Dreaming the End holds onto that feeling, to the possibilities that become unspeakably nameable in its wake.
1 Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents (1930), in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud Vol. 21, trans. Alan Tyson, Alix Strachey, Anna Freud, James Strachey (Vintage, New York: 2001), p. 70.
About the writer
Maxi Wallenhorst is a writer based in Berlin. She’s currently working on a dissertation on a trans poetics of metabolism at Leuphana University as well as a novel.
Image credits
Sin Wai Kin, Dreaming the End (2023), film stills. © the artist. Commissioned by Fondazione Memmo, Rome. Produced by Mira Productions. Courtesy of the artist.
Maryam Tafakory
Working at the intersection of cinema and live performance, Maryam Tafakory (b. Shiraz, Iran) makes textual and filmic collages that attempt to dissect concealed acts of erasure –of bodies, intimacies, and histories.
Nazarbazi (2022)
Digital video, 19 mins
Nazarbazi [the play of glances] is a film about love and desire in Iranian cinema, where depictions of intimacy and touch between women and men are prohibited. The film focuses primarily on images of women whose bodies have been erased and victimised in post-revolutionary cinema, alluding to discreet forms of communication that operate within yet circumnavigate the censors. The montage attempts to touch the spaces we cannot touch, inner feelings, untouchability beyond bodily experience, and the unwritten/unspoken prohibitions inside us. The film uses poetry and silence as the only languages with which we can touch these spaces of socio-political ambiguities.
unruly desire, unruly frame: On Maryam Tafakory’s
Nazarbazi
Nasrin Himada
‘We were informed from the outset of how this journey would conclude …’
Reading about you, Maryam, you make the cinema of my dreams, I follow your rhythm, the movement of the dance between sound-image, you are a ‘film-weaver’.1
Your love for the archive teems with possibility –of what appears as new, an image never seen, although it has always existed, in that archive, as someone’s memory, unforgettable yet ephemeral, an affect so familiar yet unknown, your focus and search, intention, and intuition, produce an intimacy in mid-thought, mid-dream, mid-gesture, like a sentence in formation, a poem about to be written that sounds the call for attention,
and then a cut – next scene, an endless dream, made up of parts.
Doors open then shut, lights turn on then off, a few minutes later, we’re introduced to figures all dressed in white, a snake slithers by, another frame onto blue where water meets sky, someone at a distance running toward the horizon: ‘to enter into oneself and wonder’.
I love your love for montage –
thinking about the possibility of ‘touch without touching‘ is overwhelming and uncomfortable. I know you made this film during the pandemic, but how will it read now, with the many
genocides, the many massacres, the unspeakable violence that is taking place?
There is a distance between the ones who are watching and the ones who are suffering – we are not able to touch, reach, or act –
we continue to watch, we continue to listen, we continue to grieve.
Some continued to count the days, but I know others who stopped.
June Jordan wrote, ‘the issue of the Palestinian people is the issue of the value of human life’.2
How do we express this relation between the value of human life and the value of touch?
How is the distance between desire and grief put to measure?
I am, dear Maryam, as ‘naked as silence between words’,
‘all my wounds come from love, from loving’.
I think about this when I think about my love for Palestine, and the shared grief exchanged between loved ones, between the ones we want to touch, and hold, and be near to. Or at least the wish for touch to mend our grief.
This story of grief and desire is the story of my life, writing through the absence in that presence, spaces rendered transgressive without touch but with so much breath, and what is conjured between – is it a love story entwined with loss and endless longing (for our lands), how we hold and feel what is so far away?
We are made both spectator and witness – the reach of arms, hands, fingers –
that space between yields what is unresolved –
‘we screamed’ –and I wonder how we might imagine a future beyond liberation.3
‘The endless play of ecstasy and injury full of silence’ (we see her under water, from neck up, the sound of her breathing with a bell ringing nearby) –
through the play of glances emerges a play of visions, nazar –what can be storied beyond the frame – through that spiral wall when she looks and turns, then a cut to a spiral staircase –
‘from where this gravity pulls, the indulgence of sin –’
if I were to write you a letter _____, it would go like this: you and me and Gaza,
me and you and Jenin, you and me and Hebron, me in Jerusalem, and you in Tarshiha, and I can keep going, but how many more can I name.
That space is a bellow out from inside my gut, the depth of which is unknown, for whatever is between here and my eye is hot with fire, and we are all ready to fight there’s that word: sumud now on so many people’s tongues our words, their gaze.
You and I know how to hold our hearts and run, they’ve captured our words we dreamt from love, but we know now how to use them, better yet, we know how to feel them even better yet, we know how to live them –
we know there’s no distance between us and language. We know there’s no distance between faith and language, between our tongues, and the sounds they write –there was this bond between us, the care in how we used our
words for each other, the words of our lands that we love,
a form of touch so immediate and spatial, expansive and direct, daydreaming our future,
we wrote letters only in prose and made promises we knew we couldn’t keep
touch without touching is agony and ache, the kind that lets desire rupture and enflame, imagining the earth in my palm pressed tight against your skin, the salt of the sea on my tongue, it stings my eyes, and I stare at those droplets on your face,
we were sleeping on each other in the sun –
and now, I cannot reach you.
Grief ‘became inaudible, unmentionable, untouchable, impatient silence so overflowing it is –’
I imagine us here by the sea of my country, you speak its language in the morning, then you sent me its poetry. And then. More distance, more time, more images passed us by so much we could no longer remember our words and why we wrote them.
yet we continue to wait, and I still count the days.
1 Elhum Shakerifar, ‘words sketched onto the night’s taught skin’, for Film and Video Umbrella, Online (2021).
2 June Jordan, ‘On Israel and Lebanon: A Response to Adrienne Rich from One Black Woman’ (1982), republished by The New York War Crimes, Online (2024).
3 Katherine McKittrick, ‘Something that exceeds all efforts to definitely pin it down’, in Dear Science and Other Stories (Duke University Press: Durham and London, 2021), pp. 71-74.
About the writer
Nasrin Himada is a Palestinian writer and curator from Montreal. Their practice is heavily influenced by their long term friendships and by their many on-going collaborations with artists, filmmakers and poets. Nasrin’s recent project, For Many Returns, experiments with writing as an act dictated by love, and typifies their current curatorial interests, which foreground desire as transformation and liberation through many forms.
Image credits
Maryam Tafakory, یزابرظن Nazarbazi (2022), film stills. Courtesy of the artist
Archival images appropriated from:
Sheida [Kamal Tabrizi, 1999]
Dear Cousin Is Lost [Dariush Mehrjui, 1998]
The Red Ribbon [Ebrahim Hatamikia, 1999]
About the Jarman Award
The Film London Jarman Award recognises and supports artists working with moving image and celebrates the spirit of experimentation, imagination and innovation in the work of UKbased artist filmmakers. The Award is inspired by visionary filmmaker Derek Jarman.
Jarman Award 2024 Jury
Matthew Barrington, Cinema Curator, Barbican
Shaminder Nahal, Commissioning Editor, Arts and Topical, Channel 4
Julianknxx, 2023 Jarman Award shortlisted artist
Ali Roche, Chief Curator, Nottingham Contemporary
Eve Gabereau, Founder and Chief Executive Officer at Modern Films and Film London Board Member
Chaired by Film London Artists’ Moving Image Network (FLAMIN)
Previous Jarman Award winners
Luke Fowler (2008)
Lindsay Seers (2009)
Emily Wardill (2010)
Anja Kirschner & David Panos (2011)
James Richards (2012)
John Smith (2013)
Ursula Mayer (2014)
Seamus Harahan (2015)
Heather Phillipson (2016)
Oreet Ashery (2017)
Daria Martin (2018)
Hetain Patel (2019)
Michelle Williams Gamaker, Hannah Quinlan & Rosie
Hastings, Jenn Nkiru, Larissa
Sansour, Project Art Works and Andrea Luka Zimmerman (2020 joint winners)
Jasmina Cibic (2021)
Grace Ndiritu (2022)
Rehana Zaman (2023)
Jarman Award 2024
Tour schedule
3 October g39, Cardiff
Q&A with Larry Achiampong
15 October
Nottingham Contemporary
Q&A with Maryam Tafakory
4 November Barbican Centre, London
Q&A with Sin Wai Kin
5 November
LUX Scotland, Glasgow
Q&A with Rosalind Nashashibi
6 November Towner Eastbourne
Q&A with Maeve Brennan
14 November Spike Island, Bristol
Q&A with Melanie Manchot
16 & 17 November Whitechapel Gallery, London Weekend of events with all shortlisted artists
22 November The MAC Belfast Screening of touring programme
25 November 2024 Film London Jarman Awardee announced
30 November & 1 December Whitechapel Gallery, London Looped screenings of touring programme
Credits
Editor Nathan Geyer
Graphic design
Identity design
For FLAMIN
Contributing writers
Duncan Poulton
Regular Practice
Maggie Ellis
Rose Cupit
Duncan Poulton
Nathan Geyer
Kaitlene Koranteng
Jessica Wan
Maria Palacios Cruz
Mimi Howard
Emily LaBarge
Maxi Wallenhorst
Nasrin Himada
Jarman Award
Patrons
John Akomfrah
Rupert Everett
Dexter Fletcher
Hetain Patel
Tony Peake
Tilda Swinton
Toyah Willcox