Artists' Film International: Solidarity #1

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.

From different perspectives, these two films explore what is lost when whole communities and cultures aren’t valued, and are either ignored or deliberately erased.

we would be freer is also being shown in tandem with the exhibition ‘Art Sale in Solidarity with Gaza and Lebanon’ at Tromsø Kunstforening, 7-22.12.2024.

we would be freer

Rana Nazzal Hamadeh, 2023, 8 mins (Selected by MMAG Foundation, Jordan)

we would be freer (بنكون اكتر احرار) is a short film reflecting on the relationship between native plants and peoples living under settler-colonialism. The film looks at the zesty sumac plant, native to parts of Turtle Island and to the eastern Mediterranean, and used as a medicine, a spice, a dye, and more. Weaving between the voices of two women, one from the Mohawk community of Kahnawá:ke and the other an internally displaced refugee in Ramallah, we would be freer invites you to contemplate the role of the sumac plant in two occupied lands that lie far apart.

Rana Nazzal Hamadeh is a Palestinian artist based on unceded Anishinaabe Algonquin land. Her photography, film, and installation works look at issues related to time, space, memory, and movement, offering interventions rooted in a decolonial framework. Rana holds an MFA in Documentary Media from Toronto Metropolitan University and finds herself between Ramallah and Ottawa.

No Oxbridge Spires

Maud Sulter, Unknown - after 1989, 10:48 mins (Selected by Tramway, Scotland)

“And it made me wonder about how communities are lost. No Oxbridge Spires for us, no ancient relics carved in stone. No permanence. ”

The artist Maud Sulter follows her mother, her aunt and her daughters on a meander through the Gorbals, in south Glasgow, where Sulter grew up. Moving through the urban landscape, the film comes to rest on the apartment block once home to the artist and her family, scheduled for demolition in plans to transform an area long-known for its poverty and deprivation, far from the elite education and historic buildings of Oxford and Cambridge colleges. The film offers a journey through complex layers of (auto) biography, history, story, family connections, and diaspora that situate black female experience within the politics of place and reflections on working class solidarity.

Maud Sulter (1960–2008, b. Glasgow, Scotland) was an award-winning artist and writer, cultural historian, curator and gallerist of Ghanaian and Scottish heritage who lived and worked in the UK. Throughout her career and across different media, she interrogated the representation of black women in the histories of art, the media and photography, investigating the complex experiences of the African diaspora in European history and culture over the past six hundred years.

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.