Sulaïman Majali’s Margaret Tait Award Commission ‘in the house of names’ to Premiere at Glasgow Film Festival
Part of Margaret Tait Commission
We are pleased to announce that Sulaïman Majali’s new commission ‘in the house of names’ will premiere at Glasgow Film Festival in March 2023.
‘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 dissolve 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.
Working with the archival, constructed, (re)staged, costumed, remote, translated, refused, imagined, disrupted and encountered, ‘in the house of names’ engages the studio as itself a site of rupture and methodology of collapse to produce film as a ‘thinking and thinkable thing’. Through treating site, production and research as entangled processes, ‘in the house of names’ reveals an editorial and compositional geometry that plays between sleep, seasonal and solar/lunar cycles, in which ‘narrative is best left to its own devices’.
‘in the house of names’ will be accompanied by captions and audio description by Collective Text.
Following the premiere at Glasgow Film Festival 2023, Sulaïman Majali’s commission will tour to venues across the UK and be presented at LUX’s exhibition space in London.
Tickets for the screening at Glasgow Film Theatre will be released soon.
Access
‘in the house of names’ will be accompanied by captions and audio description devised in collaboration with Collective Text.
The screening will be free to attend, but ticketed. A limited number of wheelchair accessible tickets will be available. Tickets will be available soon to book directly through Glasgow Film Theatre here.
Glasgow Film Theatre has level access at the main entrance with a permanent ramp. Cinema 1, an accessible toilet and the upstairs bar can be reached via lift.
For more information on venue accessibility please see the access section of Glasgow Film Theatre’s website here and the venue access guide here.
Image 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.
Sulaïman Majali
Sulaïman Majali (b.1492/1771/1991/2042) is concerned with performance-led research in a thinking practice that plays with image, sculpture, sound and writing expansively. Considering art as an already thinking and speaking thing, Majali brings into play rupturing, grieving and dreaming as methodologies of collapse, fleeing towards poetic and conceptual strategies to undergo the liberatory in the neurodigital, psychospiritual, ontoepistemological or otherwise (already), anyway
Exhibitions and events include; THE FUTURE IS DEAD LONG LIVE THE FUTURES, part of Age of Many Posts expanded public programme, The Barbican, London, England (2022). ripe fruits before battle, part of breathe, spirit and life 呼吸、靈魂與生命, The Bluecoat, Liverpool, England (2022). Arab resting by a stream, part of Meet me at the threshold, Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh, Scotland (2022). false dawn, a solo exhibition at Studio Pavillion for Glasgow International Biennial 2021. IMG_5917, produced with Camara Taylor, commissioned by Artists’ Moving Image Festival, GIVE BIRTH TO ME TOMORROW: PART 6, LUX Scotland, “online” (2021). assembly of the dispersed, part of The Internet of Things, Darat al-Funun, Amman, Jordan/”online” (2020). strange winds, a sound commission for The Common Guild’s In The Open (2020). a dream for scheherazade, EVERYTHING HAPPENED SO MUCH, 66th International Film Festival Oberhausen, Germany (2020). saracen go home, a solo exhibition at Collective Gallery, Edinburgh, Scotland (2019). something vague and irrational, Celine Gallery, Glasgow, Scotland (2019). Mene Mene Tekel Parsin, Wysing Arts Centre (2017). towards an archive, 8th Cairo Video Festival (2017).
Partners
Part of Margaret Tait Commission
The Margaret Tait Commission is a LUX Scotland commission delivered in partnership with Glasgow Film, backed by the National Lottery through Creative Scotland.