GIVE BIRTH TO ME TOMORROW | Part 6 | Sulaïman Majali and Camara Taylor

We are delighted to announce the sixth instalment of GIVE BIRTH TO ME TOMORROW, this year’s Artists’ Moving Image Festival, which has been co-programmed by artists and writers Tako Taal and Adam Benmakhlouf. For Part 6, we present a new online commission, IMG_​5917 (2021) by artists Sulaïman Majali and Camara Taylor working together in an ongoing collaboration, retreat. Available online via the LUX Scotland website from 6 – 13 October here.

retreat is a collaborative endeavour that grabs, evades and inhabits slippages. Concerned with the implicit failings of research, praxis and (a lack of) practice; retreat floats amidst the outlines of absences; trace, gesture and evidence of that which has been expelled, or refuses to be held. The work also stems from frustration, fatigue and cognitive dissonances: a desire to retreat from particular ways of working, being, making publics. Exhibition something vague and irrational (2019) at Celine Gallery, Glasgow, illustrated and/​or pointed to the feelings, frustrations and propositions that initiated the collaboration.

retreat continues through the forum of GIVE BIRTH TO ME TOMORROW with a newly commissioned video work, IMG_​5917. In the work, flat planes of grey, green and purple convolute an encounter with a collapsed tree on a long walk; the device weights conversation in a misremembered image.

Image: Sulaïman Majali and Camara Taylor, IMG_​5917, 2021

The festival will continue with a series of screenings and events scheduled to follow the lunar calendar across the rest of 2021. The programme lies in between the folds of artists’ moving image, performance documentation, protest documentary and animation, considering their strategies for interruption, to undo the formal and psychological trappings of a neo-colonial, white supremacist, capitalist, patriarchal cinema system.

Image descriptions

1. A landscape graphic with protest placard like shapes emblazoned with the words ​‘GIVE BIRTH TO ME TOMORROW’ in capitalised san serif font. The rectangular shapes splay out across a deep purple background, overlapping one another.

2. A video still in greys, purples with spots of white, green and yellow, a pixelated landscape.

GIVE BIRTH TO ME TOMORROW, this year’s Artists’ Moving Image Festival, is supported by Screen Scotland and Film Hub Scotland in partnership with Tramway.

Sulaïman Majali (b.2941) brings into play rupturing, grieving and dreaming as methodologies of collapse. Considering art as an already thinking and speaking thing, the artists agitate/​incite/​perform towards poetic and conceptual strategies for surviving and evading empire. At issue in the play is the liberatory or otherwise.

Camara Taylor (b.1627) is an artist and – – – who lives and works in Glasgow. They work with their various selves, collaborators and organisations to produce still and moving images, texts and other things /​/​Recent projects depart from rumour, gossip and ambivalent readings of historical matter | the work tends towards the excesses of dominant discourse(s) and lower frequencies of objection _​_​mostly in the context of Black life.