showroom: worldly portals

21 August.

Remi Vesala, in collaboration with Baltic Circle

this room is filled with tension between life and becoming

(they are rewriting a ghost story)

showroom is a metamorphic event concept, where different ways of watching and listening together are experimented with. The edition titled “worldly portals” is an evening consisting of a curated screening of moving-image works, short films and a live music performance by Niña Sombra.

List of short films screened during the evening:

marlow magdalene: Velvet Rain (2019)
duration: approx. 7 min
language: english

The undead are watching you, Suzan. Run, Suzie, run. This conceptual zombie collage centers the eminent violence Black folk experience amidst white surveillance.

krissy mahan: When a Butch Dyke Dies (2014)
duration: 2 min 11 s
language: english

What happens to butch dykes when their health fails and/or they die? There are some things that need to be considered in advance (cocks, exes, underwear…). I made this as a way to make light of a near-death illness.

krissy mahan: My Crazy Boxers (2013)
duration: 8 min
language: english

Institutional violence is sometimes hard to name because it has been normalized as neutral. But people experiencing it know that living “between checkboxes” can be a life or death matter. The film re-enacts a conversation based on actual meetings with hospital staff while in a psychiatric hospital system.

* HOX: The film contains instances of queer- and transphobic attitudes of the medical industry, invalidation from the medical community and refers to an suicide attempt. These may be distressing or triggering for some viewers. Viewer discretion is advised.

ONCE WE WERE ISLANDS: We Come With Nothing (2023)
duration: 30 min
language: English
subtitles: English

We Come With Nothing is a film reimagining the 2021 stagework of the same name. Inspired by ‘constellation novels’ and ghost stories, it conjures a shadow world of broken connections. What happens when a relationship ends in estrangement? What do we discover when we stare into this black hole?

Basma Alsharif: Home Movies Gaza (2013)
duration: 24 min
language: arabic
subtitles: english

For the failure of civilization. In an attempt to describe the everyday of a place that struggles for the most basic of human rights, this video claims a perspective from within the domestic spaces of a territory that is complicated, derelict, and altogether impossible to separate from its political identity.

Niña Sombra floods the spaces every time their machines start generating sounds taking every breath below the soil, blindfolded stepping forward the secret passages.

Remi Vesala is a freelance curator living in Helsinki. Vesala takes situations and places as starting points for curatorial work, aiming to make space for complexity, theory and emotions. Vesala shares an artistic practice together with visual artist Jade Kallio. Together they make experimental short films focusing on queer eco-fiction.

marlow magdalene is a filmmaker whose work explores the transgressive space of Black memory, social death, intercellular trauma, and the underbelly of the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. His work showcases a gothic, low-fi lens into a cinematic universe composed through dance, harrowing portraits of Black depression, and lyrical camera movement.

krissy mahan is a self-taught filmmaker who centers marginalized people, such as people with disabilities, working class and queer people.

ONCE WE WERE ISLANDS is a Queer art collective. Chris Gylee and Aslan have been living and making artwork together for more than a decade. Their practice is multidisciplinary with a strong emphasis on writing, film and live performance and involves elements of publication, installation, and curation. www. oncewewereislands.com

Basma Alsharif is a visual artist using moving and still images, sound, and language, to explore the anonymous individual in relation to political history and collective memory. She received an MFA from the School of Art and Design at the University of Illinois, Chicago in 2007 and has been working in Cairo, Beirut, and Amman since then.

Her work has shown in exhibitions and film festivals internationally including the 17th SESC Videobrasil, Forum Expanded: Berlinale, Images Festival Ontario where she received the Marion McMahon Award, Manifesta 8 The Region of Murcia, The Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival, The 9th Edition of the Sharjah Bienniale where she received a jury prize for her work, the Toronto International Film Festival, and she was awarded the Fundación Marcelino Botín Visual Arts Grant in 2009-2010.

*In collaboration with the Baltic Circle Festival.