Artists' Film International: Solidarity #3

Note: These films are shown at KINOBOX, first floor, Prostneset Havneterminal, Tromsø.

Artists’ Film International is a partnership of 15 international organisations that celebrates moving-image. Every year, each organisation selects a film from an artist connected to their region, based on a collectively agreed theme.

Branching out from the theme of SOLIDARITY, the films selected reflect on the act of coming together; in friendship, community and resistance.

The two films on show both reflect on how to find and build community in the modern world. Using ritual, technology and popular culture, both films seek connection as a source of strength, and means to overcome alienation.

The films’ themes of transformation through connection and ritual mirror those in Tromsø Kunstforening’s festival exhibition, We Circle in Darkness, Consumed by Light.

MASS

Nadeem Din-Gabisi, 2020, 13.27 mins (Forma, London, UK)

Nadeem Din-Gabisi’s film MASS departs from Tina Campt’s concept ‘Black visual frequency’ to imagine how a sense of belonging and connection might be found within the urban environment, and explore how collectivity, allegiances and bonds congregate around an individual’s experiences, both seen and unseen.

Nadeem Din-Gabisi is an award winning, poet-songwriter and visual artist. Nadeem’s work seeks to reimagine and investigate blackness as it pertains to his experiences as a British born, second generation immigrant of Sierra Leonean descent. Nadeem also looks to examine blackness as it pertains to the unknown, where he explores the depths of human experience to better understand his life and living. His 2020 short film MASS screened at Glasgow Short Film Festival, Alchemy Film Festival and Bali International Short Film Festival.

filled up, torn open

Deividas Vytautas Aukščiūnas 2022/24, 9 mins (Selected by Sapieha Palace, CAC, Vilnius, Lithuania)

filled up, torn open visually reflects on the familiar and the taboo. The familiar is highlighted through repeated references to pop culture, contemporaneity in both its physical and online forms, and religious iconography. The taboo appears in the way these disparate yet corresponding elements converge - through the sensual, intimate, and sometimes violent bodily proximity of the characters that occupy the frame. Seemingly fragmented, what unites these elements is the force of desire, the search for experiences that would surpass, even if for a brief moment, the constraints of their physical bodies. In the resulting fever dream-like narrative, the status quo of the rational world breaks apart and, in its stead, new radical imaginaries emerge.

Deividas Vytautas Aukščiūnas (b. 1996, Chicago, USA) is a Lithuanian visual artist who received his MA in contemporary art practice from the Royal College of Art (UK) in 2022 and a BA in film from the University of Westminster (UK) in 2017. Recent solo and group exhibitions include Todestrieb at Generation & Display, London (2024), Escapismus at Kunstpunkt, Berlin (2024) and Shells of the Self at Crash Club, Warsaw (2024),

Artists’ Film International (AFI) is a partnership between: argos centre for audiovisual arts, Brussels, Belgium; Ballroom Marfa, Texas, USA; Center for Contemporary Arts Afghanistan in eXiLe e.V., (CCAA in EXiLe), Frankfurt, Germany; Cultural Center of Belgrade, Belgrade, Serbia; Forma, London, UK; Fundación Proa, Buenos Aires, Argentina; Galleria d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Bergamo (GAMeC), Bergamo, Italy; Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE), Los Angeles, USA; MMAG Foundation, Amman, Jordan; Project 88, Mumbai, India; Sapieha Palace, branch of the Contemporary Art Centre (CAC), Vilnius, Lithuania; Tramway, Glasgow, Scotland; Tromsø Kunstforening/Romssa Dáiddasiida,Tromsø, Norway; Video-Forum of Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (n.b.k), Berlin, Germany.

KINOBOX is a micro-kino, which screens a broad range of works and artistic approaches, selected with consideration for their material, political and aesthetic sensibilities. Central to our curation is this belief in the importance of artists moving-image to question how we consume and are consumed by our media landscape.