Shortlist Announced for 2020/21 Margaret Tait Award

We are delighted to announce the shortlist for the 2020/​21 Margaret Tait Award:

Emilia Beatriz

Sulaïman Majali

Kimberley O’Neill

Hardeep Pandhal

The shortlist has been selected from a pool of eligible artists who were nominated through an open call process. The shortlisted artists have been invited to submit a proposal for the £15,000 commission, which will premiere at Glasgow Film Festival in 2021 and subsequently tour with LUX Scotland. The 2020/​21 Award will be announced on Monday 2 March 2020 at the world premiere of Ashley by Jamie Crewe, recipient of the 2019/​20 Award.

The Margaret Tait Award is Scotland’s most prestigious moving image prize for artists. Inspired by the pioneering Orcadian filmmaker and poet Margaret Tait (1918 – 99), the award recognises experimental and innovative artists working with the moving image, offering a unique avenue of commissioning and production support and providing a high-profile platform to exhibit newly commissioned work.

Established in 2010, the Margaret Tait Award is a LUX Scotland commission delivered in partnership with Glasgow Film, with support from Screen Scotland. The only award of its kind in Scotland, it allows LUX Scotland, Glasgow Film and Screen Scotland to make a lasting and meaningful impact on the careers of promising filmmaking talent, support new commissions and forge new partnerships across the sector.

Each year, the Award is presented to a Scottish or Scotland-based artist who has established a significant body of work over the past 5 – 12 years; is recognised by peers for their contribution to the artists’ moving image sector; and can demonstrate the significant impact that the award will have on the development of their practice.

Nominations are assessed by a jury of artists and professionals from across the fields of the visual arts and cinema. This year’s jury is Sarah Forrest (2017/​18 Award recipient); Myriam Mouflih (Africa in Motion and Transmission Gallery); Helen Nisbet (Curator and Artistic Director, Art Night); Morgan Quaintance (artist); Sean Greenhorn (Creative Scotland) and Kitty Anderson (LUX Scotland, chair).

Previous recipients of the Margaret Tait Award include Jamie Crewe, Alberta Whittle, Sarah Forrest, Kate Davis, Duncan Marquiss, Charlotte Prodger, Rachel Maclean, Anne-Marie Copestake and Torsten Lauschmann.

Emilia Beatriz is an artist, organiser and beekeeper in-study. Emilia’s practice centres sensorial storytelling, poetic ways of knowing, and speculative dreaming and action, grounded in conversation, oral history and community archiving. Emilia uses film, photography, text, sound and performance to create multi-sensory installations and situations. Their recent work re-imagines embodied histories of land, healing and resistance at the intersections of ​‘care, cure and crisis,’ focusing on intergenerational and inter-species listening, grief-work, and ecological struggle as practices of decolonial world-building. Emilia’s practice is nourished and underpinned by workshops, shared research and collaborations including conserving/​digitising films & materials for The Museum of Vieques Historical Memory, Cinenova feminist video distributor and Transmission Gallery Resource Room; collaborating as Letitia Beatriz aka *~care and rage*~ and working with Collective Text.

Sulaïman Majali (b. 1991, London) lives and works in Glasgow, Scotland. Majali is an artist and writer who interrogates the spatiotemporal logics of the enduring colonial and subsequent incarcerations of histories and their futures. The work considers its contexts as an age of anxiety, crises, collapse and multiplicities and looks through a diasporic optic to poetic strategies for disruption and divergent modes of remembering. Their upcoming solo exhibition Saracen go home opens 31^st January 2020, Collective Gallery, Edinburgh. Group exhibitions and events include something vague and irrational, with Ray Camara, Celine Gallery, Glasgow, Scotland (2019). LUX Scotland and David Dale Gallery screening programme, Glasgow (2019).assembly of the poets, a reading as part of EARTH HOLD for Qalandiya International Biennial (2018). Mene Mene Tekel Parsin, Wysing Arts Centre, Cambridge, UK (2017). 8^th Cairo Video Festival, Cairo, Egypt (2017). this scattering of minds; like seeds, Kunsthalle Exnergasse, Vienna/​Transmission Gallery. as if we were strangers; that strangeness was ours, CCA Glasgow. Dark Speculative Futurity and the Rise of Neo-Nationalism (The Search for New Dimensions), Tohu Magazine conference, Jaffa, Palestine (2017). On The Edge of a Continent, Glasgow International (2016).

Kimberley O’Neill is an artist based in Glasgow. Recent activities include; Enigma Body Tech, solo exhibition, Satellites Programme at Collective Gallery, Edinburgh, 2019; Ways to Speculate, Screening, Site Gallery, Sheffield, 2019; Co-Programmer of AMIF 2019 with Ima-Abasi Okon & Emmie McCluskey at Tramway, Glasgow.

Hardeep Pandhal is interested in how traumatic narratives in both fiction and reality are consumed and reproduced in society. Taking the premise that heritage is constituted through performative and discursive practices, Pandhal is currently exploring the ways in which societal stories and identities are subject to conflicting realities that shift over time and place. Taking cues from subaltern points of view, Pandhal’s intends to give voice to what he describes as the ​‘generative space of disinheritance’, following experiences of racism, by connecting practices of associative thinking and elliptical wordplay akin to rap production across a wide range of interconnected subject matter and media formats, including rap itself.

Images: 1 – 2. Emilia Beatriz, a forecast, a haunting, a crossing, a visitation, (3‑channel video and still), 2019. Courtesy of the artist. 3 – 4. Sulaïman Majali, cyphers in the dream (video still), 2019. Courtesy of the artist. 5 – 6. Kimberley O’Neill, Rerouting, 2019. Courtesy of the artist. 7 – 8. Hardeep Pandhal, Paranoid Picnic The Phantom BAME, 2018. Courtesy of the artist.