Video Jam presents 

Spaces-in-between 

RNCM Theatre 
7th February 2020 
7:30pm 

Filmmakers

Saodat Ismailova

Razan AlSalah

Christin Turner

Oleksiy Radynski

Joe Namy

Musicians

Lafawndah & Alya Al-Sultani

Nabihah Iqbal

Chaines

Seaming To

Kelly Jane Jones

In an age of mass displacement, what does it mean to feel ‘at home’? Video Jam premiers 5 commissioned short films by artists based around the world, each scored by a different UK composer, reflecting on home and history, desire and estrangement, nationhood and mythology, extinction and exile. 

Spaces-in-between will explore and re-imagine a variety of indeterminate, contested or hidden spaces: deserted opera houses in the Middle East and incomplete cityscapes in Eastern Europe, ancient mythological hinterlands and places now only accessible via Google Maps. Together, these commissioned films offer a variety of perspectives and contexts for encountering how displacement manifests in ways that often go ignored, forgotten or hidden from outside view, whether collectively internalised by communities or lost amongst the ruins and remnants of the past.

Saodat Ismailova

Saodat Ismailova is an Uzbek filmmaker and one of the most internationally visible and accomplished representatives of a new generation of artists who came of age in the post-Soviet era. Her debut feature film 40 Days of Silence, a poignant depiction of four generations of Tajik women living in the complete absence of men, was nominated for best debut film at the 2014 Berlin International Film Festival, and thereafter screened in more than two dozen prestigious festivals around the world. Ismailova resides in Tashkent and Paris, and is affiliated with Le Fresnoy, France’s National Studio of Contemporary Arts.

HER RIGHT BY SAODAT ISMAILOVA SCORED BY SEAMING TO

Her Right journeys back to ‘Hujum’, a political campaign that took place in 1920s Uzbekistan under the newly established Communist Party. Meaning ‘attack’ or ‘assault’, Hujum began with the unveiling of Muslim women in an attempt to bring them to public life and create a new workforce. Women found themselves flattened in-between traditional society and an imposed state ideology, risking their lives if they showed resistance to the new foreign government. Both veiled and unveiled women feared harassment – the veiled by the new regime, the unveiled by traditionalists. For many it was a century of emotional and social displacement that has still not been finally resolved.

SEAMING TO

Described as “the voice of the 21st Century” (Radio 1), RNCM alumni Seaming To is a composer, vocalist and multi-instrumentalist with a bewitching stage presence. She has worked with music luminaries such as Herbaliser and the Cinematic Orchestra and performance related collaborations including an animation for surrealist theatre company Forkbeard Fantasy, plus soundtracks with the filmmaker Michael England. Hailing from a family of concert pianists, following her studies she began performing and releasing albums in Manchester with supergroups Homelife (Ninja Tune) and Graham Massey’s Toolshed. Seaming’s score for Her Right follows her live accompaniment to Victoria Keddie’s Test Patterns for Video Jam x Basquiat at the Barbican Concert Hall, January 2018.

Circulation by Oleksiy Radynski
scored by Kelly Jayne Jones 

Circulation presents the landscape and cityscape of Kyiv captured in a perpetual loop from the viewpoint of Kyiv’s ring railway, representing the gaze in permanent displacement, flight or purposeless wandering; a crucial experience for the uprooted, fleeing and/or dispossessed masses of human beings that are set in motion by the global military, economic and climate crises. The train’s circular movement suggests a society in constant transition without destination; a transition from the Communist ‘never’ into the Capitalist ‘always,’ revealing the city’s decrepit post-industrial areas, its newly-built affluent housing estates, its crumbling pieces of social infrastructure and parts of its ‘Westernised’ city centre. 

Oleksiy Radynski (Ukraine)

Oleksiy Radynski is a filmmaker and writer based in Kyiv, Ukraine. He uses documentary film practice to explore the relationship between observation and participation, fact and fiction, ideology and affect. Oleksiy’s Video Jam commission follows his previous work The Film of Kyiv (2017-2019), a long-term episodic series formed around filmed observations of architectural locations and urban spaces in the capital. Oleksiy’s films have been screened at Oberhausen International Short Film Festival, Institute of Contemporary Arts (London), DOK Leipzig, e-flux (New York), S A V V Y Contemporary (Berlin) among other venues, and received awards at a number of film festivals. He is a participant of Visual Culture Research Center, an initiative for art, knowledge, and politics founded in Kyiv, 2008. Currently, he is a BAK Fellow at basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht.

Kelly Jayne Jones

Video Jam first worked with Kelly in 2017, when she scored a short film by Sri Lankan filmmaker Vimukthi Jayasundara at Manchester Museum. Combining performance, installation and sound, Kelly’s work over the years has expanded to include dance, gesture, sonic drawings and stone sculpture. She is interested in creating multi-sensory experiences that foster possible conditions for fruitful communication and exchange, bordering multiple contemporary areas of practice including science and quantum fictions. She recently developed a collaborative work with Haris Epaminoda entitled Chimera, shown at the Venice Biennale 2019.

Libretto-o-o by Joe Namy
scored by Lafawndah with Alya Al-Sultani

Libretto-o-o is an exploration of the history and resonance of Middle Eastern opera. Traversing the architecture of five theatres throughout the Middle East — some of which were never completed, others ranking amongst the most lavish theatres ever constructed — the film is a meditation on the poetics of the opera house, stylistically embodied as a remake of Kenneth Anger’s Eaux-d’Artifice. As Joe Namy describes: “This constellation of opera houses will provide the backdrop for a sonically rich and complex soundtrack reflecting on these spaces.”

Joe Namy (Lebanon)

Joe Namy is an artist and educator, often working collaboratively and across mediums — in performance, sculpture, photography, text, video, and installation. Namy graduated with an M.F.A. from New York University, and has independently studied jazz, Arabic, and heavy metal drumming. His projects often focus on the social constructs of music and organised sound, such as the pageantry and geo-politics of opera, the noise laws and gender dynamics of bass, the colours and tones of militarisation, and the migration patterns of instruments and songs. His work has been exhibited, screened, and amplified at Art Night London, the Asia Culture Center in Gwangju, the Berlinale, the Brooklyn Museum, the Beirut Art Center, the Detroit Science Center, La Biennale de Montreal, Nottingham Contemporary, Sharjah Biennial 13, and other festivals, radio stations, and dance floors.

Lafawndah

Lafawndah, now based in London, grew up in Paris and has spent time in past years between Mexico and the US, Egypt and Iran. Her majestic musical style roller-coasters from thundering percussion to hypnotic bass production, as pop music infused with salsa, flamenco and rhythms drawn from influence all over the world. Her current incarnation as a devotional pop polymath is as unpredictable as her compositional style. Throughout Lafawndah’s music, one can trace the influence of musical antecedents AR Rahmann, Missy Elliott, or Geinoh Yamashirogumi, all the while feeling and sounding only like herself. 

Alya Al-Sultani

Alya Al-Sultani is a dramatic soprano, opera composer and producer based in London. Her compositions take influence from the Iraqi folk songs and classical Arabic music of her childhood as well as the method, aesthetics and politics of jazz. She enjoys debuting new compositions for contemporary composers and experimenting with opera, including the integration of improvisational techniques, microtonal ideas and Middle Eastern influences. In early 2017, Al-Sultani wrote, arranged and performed a new opera titled Two Sisters with Arabic libretto. Her other  life-long passion is electronic music: she is the producer and co-owner of Agency, a grime label based in South London which she runs with GRANDMIXXER and is currently experimenting on integrating electronic sounds and grime energy in her opera composition. 

Razan AlSalah (Palestine/Canada)

Razan is a filmmaker and media artist living and working in Montreal, Canada. Her work formally aligns body, image, object/place particularly using visual perspective to create an embodied (dis) connection between different times, places and scales. Razan is a 2019 Arab Fund for Arts and Culture (AFAC) Grantee and Sundance New Frontier Story Lab Fellow, selected to develop The Greatest Wait, an experimental VR film that investigates the Palestinian exilic body in a story of impossible and eternal return to Palestine through virtual reality. In 2018, she was awarded the Knight Foundation New Frontier Fellowship and Grant at the Sundance Film Festival, and the Barbara Aronofsky Latham Award for an Emerging Experimental Video Artist at the Ann Arbor Film Festival. Her work has recently been acquired by the Palestine Films Collection.

Nabihah Iqbal

A rising star of alternative pop, Nabihah’s music is a mixture of tender dream-pop, moody and propulsive percussion, grungy guitar and shimmering synth soundscapes. Formerly known as ‘Throwing Shade’, Nabihah’s debut album for Ninja Tune, ‘Weighing of the Heart’, is one of the most talked about albums of the past few years. The title alludes to ancient Egyptian beliefs about the judgement of someone who has passed away: upon death, one’s heart would be weighed against a feather to determine whether it was in balance with the universe, and only then could a person proceed into the afterlife. Nabihah holds a degree from Cambridge in African History and has experience working in human rights law in South Africa. She holds a bi-weekly show on NTS where she explores global sounds, which has been influenced by her degree from SOAS in Ethnomusicology. She’s collaborated with Chinese artist Zhang Ding, received a commission from Tate to compose music for the Turner Prize, and collaborated with Wolfgang Tilmmans as part of his Tate Modern exhibition.

Dreaming in Red by Christin Turner 
scored by Chaines 

Dreaming in Red is a poetic, time travelling meditation on ecological disaster via a hand processed black and white 16mm montage of people in hiding within an ambiguous setting and time frame. Jolting from the temporal to the primal experience of the unknown, gradual cues subtly suggest that the setting is Pompeii during the volcanic eruption. CHAINES will create a dynamic, modular score using live musicians and electronics.

Christin Turner - (US/Berlin) 

Christin Turner is a Berlin based filmmaker and video artist originally from Southern California whose work draws upon her background in the visual arts. Her use of color and light has been described as painterly, impressionistic, and psychedelic. Christin’s narrative work depicts landscape as both metaphor and means for traversing psychological terrains, such as her acclaimed short Vesuvius at Home (2018), an experimental travelogue. Turner received an MFA from the University of Colorado at Boulder, and a BA from the University of California San Diego. Her experimental films have screened at a variety of venues including the International Film Festival Rotterdam, Karlovy-Vary, Kurzfilmtage Winterthur, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Edinburgh International Film Festival, Festival du Nouveau Cinema Montreal, 25FPS Festival, Kurzfilmtage Winterthur and Hamburg. Her work has been supported with residencies at the MacDowell Colony and Bogliasco Foundation.

Chaines

Chaines is an RNCM alumni who writes surreal and fantastical electronic and electro-acoustic music. They were commissioned twice by Video Jam in 2014 to work with filmmaker Mary Stark, resulting in new work premiered at Manchester Art Gallery and showcased on a UK tour with Slip imprint. Their recent album ‘The King’ was ranked in FACT magazine’s top 25 albums of 2018's first quarter and was made Boomkat's album of the week. As well as their solo electronic work, Chaines has also worked extensively with the London Contemporary Orchestra. Commissions for the LCO have always been electro-acoustic in nature, using both small and orchestral scale ensembles with electronics, premiering works at venues such as The Royal Albert Hall, Tate Modern and the Roundhouse (Ron Arad's Curtain Call 2016). They have been in residence with SAY award winner Anna Meredith and Grammy Award winner Imogen Heap, improvising, performing and producing audio and video.

Supporting statements

“Since Video Jam brought their live soundtrack to Ron Fricke’s Baraka to RNCM three years ago, we’ve been wanting to work with them on something even more original and exciting. Inspired by our 2019/20 artistic theme We Are Migrants, Video Jam created a brief that would challenge artists to explore related issues surrounding home, estrangement and exile. Spaces-in-between will involve several students from the RNCM performing live; and this time we go even further as we also welcome some College alumni back into the fold (Seaming To and Chaines). We can’t wait to present to our ever-curious audience the results of these inspirational international collaborations.”

Matt Whitham, Programming Manager, RNCM

“We’re delighted to be working with Video Jam on this exciting collaborative project, Spaces -in-between, bringing together international artist film-makers with UK artists and composers to explore the realms of music and film. Video Jam’s curatorial themes invite collaborators  shared common creative experience, make new connections, and reveal a world of hidden stories.”

Joel Mills, Senior Programme Manager, British Council 

Video Jam presents Spaces-in-between is in partnership with the British Council and RNCM, funded by Arts Council England. 

For interviews, PR requests please contact Video Jam Co-Director Shereen Perera - shereenandreaperera@gmail.com