Film London Jarman Award 2021 booklet

JARMAN AWARD

Film London Jarman Award 2021

Film London Jarman Award 2021 Shortlisted Artists Larry Achiampong Sophia Al-Maria Jasmina Cibic Adham Faramawy Guy Oliver Georgina Starr Jury

About the Jarman Award

Iwona Blazwick OBE Director, Whitechapel Gallery

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 UK-based artist filmmakers. The Award is inspired by visionary filmmaker Derek Jarman, and is presented in partnership with the Whitechapel Gallery.

Amal Khalaf, Director of Programmes at Cubitt, London and Projects Curator at the Serpentine Galleries Shaminder Nahal Commissioning Editor (Arts and Factual), Channel 4 Larissa Sansour, Artist, winner of Jarman Award 2020 Tyrone Walker-Hebborn Director, Genesis Cinema Chaired by Film London Artists’ Moving Image Network (FLAMIN)

The previous Jarman Award winners are: 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).

Welcome Now in its fourteenth year, we are thrilled to present the Film London Jarman Award 2021. We are also extremely excited that this year’s Award will be celebrated both online and as an in-person ceremony at the Regent Street Cinema, spotlighting six incredible shortlisted artists and their practices, and bringing artists’ moving image to audiences across the UK and beyond.

Under the extremely difficult circumstances that the past year has presented, these artists truly reflect the spirit of the Award, celebrating experimentation, imagination and innovation by continuing to create and show work that questions and shapes the world around us.

We would like to congratulate the shortlisted artists and thank our funders, Arts Council England, as well as returning partner Whitechapel Gallery and our Film London Jarman Award Patrons, for all their vital support in helping to sustain the important legacy of Jarman himself and highlighting the cultural importance of contemporary artist filmmaking.

Adrian Wootton OBE Chief Executive of Film London & the British Film Commission

Larry Achiampong Larry Achiampong’s solo and collaborative projects employ aural and visual archives, live performance and sound to explore ideas surrounding class, cross-cultural and post-digital identity.

Achiampong’s work examines his communal and personal heritage.

Beyond the Substrata (2020) 4K video, 19 mins

Working within an abandoned supermarket in Leyton, Achiampong used the building as a means to explore the social and political issues affecting the wider area in east London including race, class, gender and gentrification. Through referencing the black body within a space that victimises it, in this case, the Western Supermarket, Achiampong uses the supermarket as a double entendre. The politicisation of and violence meted upon the black body is explored in Beyond the Substrata through choreographed movements performed by dancer Kanika Skye-Carr.

Beyond The Substrata is an artwork made possible with funding from Waltham Forest Council, WFCulture2019.

Larry Achiampong, Beyond the Substrata (2020), video still

Courtesy of the artist and Copperfield, London

Sophia Al-Maria Sophia Al-Maria’s cinematic videos explore postcolonial identity, imperialism and counter-histories, weaving together music, literature, oral history, film and dance. Her fractured, nonlinear work is often cast against a science fiction backdrop and explores the revision of history, the isolation of individuals through technology, and the corrosive elements of consumerism and industry.

Astral Bodies Electric, Make Up! (2019) HD video, 16 mins

Emerging out of the hinterland of science fiction, Astral Bodies Electric, Make Up!, is the culmination of Sophia Al-Maria and Sin Wai Kin’s shared interest in Alice Coltrane, Sailor Moon and the possibilities of poetry. The film is built around two encounters: the first locates us in the body and focusses on a repetitive insistence on breathing, allowing the viewer to find presence, and then transcendence. In the second encounter, Sin, in Sailor Moon inspired latex, guides us up through the energetic centres of the body - the chakras - in order to find the place beyond the self.

Sophia Al-Maria and Sin Wai Kin (FKA Victoria Sin), Astral Bodies Electric, Make Up! (2019), video still

Courtesy of the artists and Project Native Informant, London

Jasmina Cibic With a practice spanning performance, installation and film, Jasmina Cibic considers how ideologies and cultures are constructed and then framed through mechanisms such as art and architecture. Her work explores the construction of national culture and how it can be used for political aims, and looks at forms of soft power.

The Gift (2021) Three-channel 4K video, 30 mins

The Gift investigates how the gift economy is embedded within Europe’s identity formation, exploring particular examples of political gifts of architecture, art, music and dance to national and ideological structures, through the use of allegory and narrative. Filmed at Oscar Niemeyer’s French Communist Party Headquarters in Paris and Palais of the Nations in Geneva, The Gift investigates culture’s role as a political style-bearer and a Trojan horse for covert diplomacy and political interest.

The entirety of the scripted dialogue of the film is drawn from archival traces of discussions about soft power and cultural diplomacy.

The Gift is co-commissioned and co-produced by FLAMIN with funding from Arts Council England; steirischer herbst ‘19; macLYON; co-producers Waddington Studios London.

Supported by Cooper Gallery DJCAD, University of Dundee; Northern Film School; UGM Maribor Art Gallery; Museum of Yugoslavia; United Nations Geneva; Espace Niemeyer.

Jasmina Cibic, The Gift (2021), film still

Courtesy of the artist

Adham Faramawy Adham Faramawy works across a wide variety of media including computer programmes, moving image, apps and print.

Their performance for camera videos are often installed as part of sculptural assemblages. The works consider how social issues become entangled with environmental issues. Using movement, poetry, spoken word, and dance they tell stories about consumption, identity construction, the body and the nature of desire.

the air is subtle, various and sweet (2021) HD video, 35 mins

Mixing found footage from Egyptian television, with footage of two dancers shot on the Wanstead Flats nature reserve in east London, Faramawy’s work considers the body’s relationship to ideas of ‘the land’, plant taxonomy, and ideas of roots/heritage.

The film relates this exploration to the passing of the artists’ father during the pandemic, and their relationship, particularly their father’s strong affinity as an artist and musician with his falahi (rural, agricultural and working class) roots and his home town Toukh, north of Cairo.

Adham Faramawy, the air is subtle, various and sweet (2021), video still

Courtesy of the artist

Guy Oliver Guy Oliver’s moving image work is rooted within a framework of self-portraiture, and explores notions of masculinity, identity, comedy and tragedy, taking a highly personal but irreverent working approach. The work integrates and then dissects areas of popular culture: cinema, sport, politics, popular music, standup comedy and art history act as the recurring subject matter.

You Know Nothing of My Work (2020) HD video, 33 mins

You Know Nothing of My Work is a multi-chapter rumination on the cultural dilemma of the disgraced popular icon, the tension between a problematic past and a more enlightened present, and the role of the male voice in a post-Me Too era. The work develops Oliver’s practice of mixing pop culture references with self-deprecating character performances from the artist, and explores complex social issues. The film takes the unexpected form of a musical to unpick the notion of celebrity, toxic masculinity, and moral ambiguity.

You Know Nothing of My Work is commissioned for the Jerwood/FVU Awards 2020: Hindsight, a collaboration between Jerwood Arts and Film and Video Umbrella.

Guy Oliver, You Know Nothing of My Work (2020), video still

Courtesy of the artist, Film and Video Umbrella and Jerwood Arts

Georgina Starr Georgina Starr makes videos, sound and large-scale installation works with a focus on female identity, the otherworldly, and her longstanding interests in the visionary aspects of experimental cinema. Her projects are initiated by extensive periods of research that always involve some form of writing - scripts, fictions, lectures, scores and poetry.

Quarantaine (2020) HD video, 43 mins

In Celtic mythology ‘une quarantaine’ is a 40-day period beginning on the eve of the first full moon of spring - a liminal and dangerous occasion when the barriers between the Earthly world and the Spirit world are temporarily dissolved. The film is set within this time frame and we follow two women through an arboreal portal. Quarantaine is inspired by Starr’s research into alternative educational systems, psychological techniques, musical and physical movement methods, alchemy and metaphysics, exercises in spiritual purity and codes of transcendence and bodily metamorphosis.

Quarantaine was co-commissioned by Film and Video Umbrella, The Hunterian, University of Glasgow, Leeds Art Gallery and Glasgow International with Art Fund support through the Moving Image Fund for Museums.

Supported by Arts Council England.

Georgina Starr, Quarantaine (2020), film still

Courtesy of the artist

Graphic design, Regular Practice

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