What imaginaries are subtended by the ruin as a motif used to grieve, remember and interpret past events? What role does film play in reanimating remnants of history? And how do collective forms of narration and storytelling resist modes of knowing that are imposed by colonial and patriarchal forms of knowledge production?
If the Future Were a Love Poem brings together two short films by Sophia Al-Maria, Tiger Strike Red (2022) and Beast Type Song (2019), expanding out from Mimosa House’s current exhibition, Transfeminisms Chapter II: Radical Imagination.
Following the screening, the artist will join art historian and researcher Gabe Beckhurst for a discussion. Their conversation with consider the ruin as both a metaphorical and material site where temporalities collapse, histories converge, and language is contested. This discussion will shed light on filmmaking as a feminist and decolonial methodology, and its capacity to shape the politics of the present and possibilities of the future.
Programme
Introduction
Sophia Al-Maria, Beast Type Song, 2019, 38 mins
Sophia Al-Maria, Tiger Strikes Red, 2022, 23 mins
Intermission, 5 mins
Sophia Al-Maria and Gabe Beckhurst in Conversation + Audience Q&A, 50mins
Sophia Al-Maria is a Qatari-American artist, writer, and filmmaker living and working in London. Though her work spans many disciplines including drawing, collage, sculpture, and film it is united by a preoccupation with the power of storytelling and myth, and in particular with imagining revisionist histories and alternative futures.
Gabe Beckhurst is an Associate Lecturer in the History of Art at UCL who specialises in histories of performance art and photography and their social and critical contexts. They hold a particular interest in the visual politics of self-articulation and worldbuilding, twentieth-century queer and trans formalisms, aesthetics and critical infrastructures, decolonial ecologies in performance and conceptual explorations of temporality and history.
This event is free. Booking is necessary via Eventbrite as we have limited capacity in the space ! Doors open thirty minutes before the programme begins and refreshments will be provided by Mimosa House.
*Please note that our screening room and elevator are wheelchair accessible. Live captioning and English subtitles might not be available. If you have any requests or concerns about accessibility, please get in contact at info@mimosahouse.co.uk. We will try to accommodate the best that we can.
Image: Sophia Al-Maria, BEAST TYPE SONG, 2019, Courtesy of the artist and Project Native Informant, London