14 — 21
March
2023
Online
Following the premiere at Glasgow Film Festival, we are pleased to present an online screening of Sulaïman Majali’s Margaret Tait Award Commission‘in the house of names’.
‘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’.
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).
Access
‘in the house of names’ is captioned and audio described by Collective Text.
Sensory content notes:
The film contains flashing images.
The film failed the Harding Test with 9 incidents/774 frames of Luminance Flash and 3 incidents/76 frames of Red Flash. The report showed no incidents of Spatial Pattern or Extended Failure. The Harding Test is an automatic test for photosensitive epilepsy (PSE) provocative image sequences in video content.
Image description: a landscape image shows a snake with mottled black, brown and white markings moving down grey stone outdoor stairs. The stairs are dusted with green leaves and plant matter with five oranges of varying shades of orange dotted around the snake. The ornate balustrade of the stairs is crumbling, with dust, dirt and plants creeping out of the cracks.
Closed Captions
Captions by Collective Text
Audio Described
Audio Description by Collective Text
Contains flashing imagery
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.