Non-Linear: Magnets 2

Magnets addresses different identities in production, specifically in relation to others around us. Many of the works take physical props and real-time interactions as their points of focus; and we watch how these enhance dynamics of attraction, contradiction and confluence.

The Non-linear series imagines collaborative processes and erotic immersion in place of mounting egos, overpowering criticality and fantasy futures. These latter tropes can be read as symptoms of individualising structures of control which have come to involve media making mediums of its users.

Featuring works by Marwa Arsanios, Victoria Sin, Rachel Reupke, Charles Lofton, Evan Ifekoya, Sebastian Buerkner and Korakrit Arunanondchai, curated by Shama Khanna.

The venue has step free access to all floors.

Shama Khanna is an independent curator, writer and educator based in London. Since 2013 she has curated Flatness, a multi-format research and commissioning project engaging in ideas around the screen-based image and culture after the internet. Khanna has presented screening and discussion events relating to Flatness at international venues including Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen, Chisenhale Gallery, The Showroom and Auto Italia in London, Palais de Tokyo in Paris, Moderna Museet, Malmö, Western Front, Vancouver, Microscope, New York, Rupert, Vilnius and warehouse, Berlin.

Khanna has curated numerous artists’ projects and commissions both independently and as part of collaborations with Jerwood Visual Arts, The Showroom, Goldsmiths, LUX/​ICA/​Tramway Biennial of Moving Images and Outpost in the UK, P.S. 1 and PERFORMA in NYC, Documenta14 in Athens and many more. Recently, she has been part of juries for the annual Koestler Trust awards, Berwick Film and Media Arts Festival and the LUX acquisitions panel. She teaches at Kingston and University of the Arts, London and co-edits the publication A‑or-ist with 7 other writers.

“Organizing information is an inherently political act. What one chooses to prioritize, reduce or exclude is not simply a way of making stories. It is a way of making a world. Awareness to these choices and the impact that such decision-making entails is a key facet of making documentary film, though often its perceived skill (the ​‘good’ or ​‘well-made’ documentary) is in successfully masking its formal processes of argumentation in order that its organization of information appears as an absolute reality.

The viewer is usually treated passively, nudged in one direction or another, only to arrive at a conclusion that, on reflection, always seemed inevitable. Marwa Arsanios’ Who is afraid of ideology? Part I endeavours to counter such conventions and their concealed modes of persuasion. Instead, her film depicts not only the lived paradoxes of its documented subjects, but also the contradictions in the effort to capture such complexities on camera.” ‑Mason Leaver-Yap

Narrative Reflections on Looking is a series of films on the experience of identifying with images and power dynamics in looking. Magnets presents 3 parts from the series; Preface /​Looking Without Touching; Part One /​She Was More Than the Sum of My Parts; Part 3 /​Cthulhu Through the Looking Glass –Shama Khanna

“Made in memory of my friend Ian, this short film recalls a morning spent together watching the wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton – an oblique rumination on monarchy and citizenship, friendship and loss.” – Rachel Reupke

I Like Dreaming is a confession about the pleasures of cruising straight acting, straight appearing men. Structured around the retelling of an (autobiographical) story about a public sexual encounter, I Like Dreaming seeks to make observations about the relationships between race/​class/​cultural identity ‑LUX

Am I

You me

Or are we?

WE ARE FAMILY

WE ARE FAMILY

WE ARE FAMILY

I got my sisters with me

Moving in together confronts a couple with inevitable adjustments to their personal autonomy. The dialogue employs the poetic verse structure of the pantoum, which imitates the entanglement of their commitment and acts as the language of a joined organism: a relationship.

Taking on a decidedly sombre tone, Thai artist Korakrit Arunanondchai tackles the difficult subject of death in this latest iteration of his multifarious series. As drones take on the role of spirits, animism and reincarnation establish a universe in which spirits and living species share the same stream of existence. A human-sized rat journeys through the rubble of global capitalism and asks himself: ​“Will you find beauty in this sea of data?”