Sulaïman Majali, ‘in the house of names’ screening online with Grand Union

Following the premiere at Glasgow Film Festival 2023, LUX Scotland and Grand Union present a 4‑week online screening of Sulaïman Majali’s Margaret Tait Commission, ​‘in the house of names’ – available to view on the Grand Union website until 18 March. The film is available to view with closed captions, audio description and detailed access notes are listed on the screening page.

The screening accompanies a free in-person discussion and Q&A with Sulaïman at Grand Union on Wednesday 6 March. Find out more here.

‘in the house of names’ is a moving image work that takes the clown and the magician as devices to consider the liberatory. The work applies the poetic and conceptual strategies of the crease and the fold to move through the fugitive geography of a sleep cycle.

Walking through stages one to four of sleep, the film is inhabited by (and inhabits) an​‘impossible protagonist’. Amidst the land-mind-body disintegration of the dream as a site and realm of exile, this impossible protagonist forms a vehicle and question in the work.

Filmed solely on the device, the work thinks towards the breakdown and dissolution of the digital and the neural as fixed spatialities and separate, confined, and defined states. In doing so, the filming device is at once a​“phone”/camera, a research tool, and a mode of production, but more than its technological application, the device becomes poetic, cinematic, and literary.

The Margaret Tait Commission is a LUX Scotland commission delivered in partnership with Glasgow Film, with support from Creative Scotland.

Images description: Looking down on a desert floor, made up of sand, rocks and sticks, an arched mirror lies flat on the ground at the centre of the image between two pale bushes, reflecting a grey/​blue sky and white clouds.