Artists’ Film Series
01/ Calibration

5:00 - Henry Bradley: Glossolalia: 53 mins
6:00 - Yuli Serfaty: Steady States: 16:43
6:30 - Sonia Levy: For the Love of Corals: 23:38 mins
7:00 - Sasha Litvintseva and Beny Wagner: Constant: 40 min

Henry Bradley, ‘Glossolalia’, image still, 53 min, HD Color, Stereo ,UK 2017 

Set on a single stage in East London, 'Glossolalia' hosts a method acting class, in which actors are trained to access and utilise their unconscious and irrational nature, alongside an Accent Softening Course for Business, whereby international workers learn the ‘Standard English’ accent so as to help further their careers in the UK. Interspersed throughout are a series of scenes, including children learning phonics and a contortionist performing, which further question our conditioned relationships to language, behaviour, and pedagogy.

Henry Bradley is an artist and researcher working across forms of video art, documentary, writing, and pedagogy. His recent video works act as ‘cinematic investigations’ into the effects of neoliberal ideals, managerial techniques, technological developments, and environmental crises, on the human voice and speech. Using frameworks and concepts of  ‘the event’ to underpin his projects, he sees his practice as ‘future-oriented’, working with methodologies prior to the event such a scenario-planning, simulation, rehearsals, and pedagogy, to forefront a politics of premeditated state and corporate actions and socio-cultura (re/un)learning. Collaboration is fundamental to his practice, recentl working with local groups, actors, puppeteers, teachers, and musicians.

Yuli Serfaty, ‘Steady States’, image still, 16:43 min, 4K, digital environment, sound, 2021

Steady States (2021) is a sound-based, semi-fictional digital environment depicting Israel's contested water politics; Ancient aquifers dry and collapse as the state pumps water and prevents access to locals. Sinkholes gape as the Dead Sea Works factories mine minerals, rapidly evaporating surface water. Jets fly overhead as Bedouin villages are repeatedly demolished. Using the voice of a disembodied guide, viewers are taken on 3 tours. Military radio recordings courtesy of the Israeli Defence Forces Archives.

Yuli Serfaty is a south-London based multimedia artist concerned with storytelling and worldbuilding. She works in textual, sonic, filmic and physical forms to convey geopolitical, critical narratives, and use a rhizome of field recordings, synthesised sounds, video, photography, writing, CGI, game engines and found objects. She is driven by the tension between masculinity, femininity, violence, fear, slow power, the erotic, sexual, mythological, subterranean, the rotten and the rotting, and inspired by the powers of the world to regenerate from dark, moist humus.

For the Love of Corals
A Film by Sonia Levy
23 min | HD Color | Stereo
2018
UK

In the basement of the Horniman  Museum in London, a team of marine biologists and aquarists led by Jamie Craggs have embarked on breeding corals in captivity. By mirroring the environmental circumstances – seasonal temperature changes, solar irradiance and lunar cycles – of the Great Barrier Reef within specially designed tanks, the team has become the first in the world to successfully spawn corals in a laboratory. Levy has followed Project Coral since late 2017 as a case study of new paradigms for multispecies living, environmental conservation and natural history that are emergin in the wake of the Anthropocene. The film is a cinematic inquiry that focuses on the daily labour of caring for endangered beings to resuscitate them from their imminent human-induced extinction. Whilst keeping the coral in captivity is, dishearteningly, the fundamental condition of Craggs’ research, the scientists and the coral also become entangled in sharing a space for living, working and world-making, expanding the range of possible worlds in common.

Sonia Levy's inquiry-led practice considers shifting modes of engagement with more-than-human worlds in light of prevailing Earthly precarity. Her work operates at the confluence of knowledge practices to interrogate western expansionist and extractivist logics. She was the 2022 recipient of the S+T+ARTS4Water's 'The Future of High Waters' residency hosted by TBA21 in Venice, and she was the 2021 commissioned artist at Radar Loughborough and Aarhus University's Ecological Globalization Research Group.

Sasha Litvintseva and Beny Wagner, ‘Constant’, 40 min, 2K DCP, 5.1, DE/UK, 2022

“Constant” asks what led measurement to depart from the body and become a science unto itself. The film explores three shifts in the history of measurement standardization, from the land surveying that drove Early Modern European land privatization, to the French Revolution that drove the Metric Revolution, to the conceptual dematerialisation of measurement in the contemporary era of Big Science. Each chapter traces the relationship of measurement standardization to ideas of egalitarianism, agency, justice, and power. Cinematic and technical images that begin as products of measurement systems are stretched beyond their functions to describe the resistance of lived experience to symbolic abstractions.

Sasha Litvintseva and Beny Wagner are artists, filmmakers and writers. They’ve been working collaboratively in moving image, installation, text, and lectures since 2018. Focusing on moving image as a tool for the active production of new worlds, their practice has been driven by questions about the thresholds between the body and its surroundings, knowledge regimes and power, modes of organizing and perceiving the natural world. Their collaborative work has been presented globally, including at the  Berlinale, Rotterdam, CPH:DOX, Courtisane, EXiS Seoul film festivals, CAC Vilnius, Los Angeles Filmforum, Museum of the Moving Image NY, Transmediale, Sonic Acts, Berlin Atonal and Impakt Festivals, the Moscow Young Art and Wroclaw Media Art biennales, the Baltic Triennial and was featured on the Criterion Channel. Their films have won numerous awards including the Silvestre Best Short Film at IndieLisboa and Best Short Documentary at Guanajuato Film Festival. They are the authors of All Thoughts Fly: Monster, Taxonomy, Film (Sonic Acts Press: 2021). "Constant" is a journey through the social and political histories of measurement. For most of recorded history, the human body was the measure of all things.