GIVE BIRTH TO ME TOMORROW

By Gemma Batchelor, 22.01.2021

LUX AMIF 2021 Curators, Tako Taal and Adam Benmakhlouf. Photo credit Matthew A. Williams.

Lux Scotland’s annual Artists’ Moving Image Festival (AMIF) is, in a time of frequent self-reflection and anticipation, quite aptly titled. The artist and writer Adam Benmakhlouf, co-programmer of the festival with artist Tako Taal, discusses in their introduction how the title, quoted in one of the films, was an organic choice whilst reassessing timelines in the midst of our present challenges.

The festival itself has had to re-evaluate its own timeline: what is usually a weekend long festival is now taking place over 11 months, following a lunar calendar (the next event takes place on the 13^th March, with the new moon). The altered structure not only enables the festival to be experienced, from any location, but also allows each artist’s work to be considered as a complete event itself, “a strategy against the frenetic fatigue of the festival format” says Taal. With AMIF, there’s no need for binge watching to the point of complete saturation.

For the opening weekend, five artist films are brought together, after a light-hearted and candid virtual introduction from Taal and Benmakhlouf of the Zoom type that we have come to know so well.

In Kyuri Jeon’s Born, Unborn, and Born Again, an individual, unborn presence is evoked through grammatical constructs. A voiceover switches between Korean to the future perfect tense English, implying a state of time that does not exist in the artist’s mother tongue. In this way, the artist explores issues of misogynistic Zodiac myths alongside more recent debates over the decriminalisation of abortion in South Korea (effective this year). It deals with familial ties alongside colonial histories, examining the micro and macro.

Another in the opening line up, Sharon Hayes’ Fingernails on a blackboard: Bella of 2014 again uses the medium of speech, despite being a silent film. A transcript between a politician and her vocal coach plays before us, as the pair work at neutralising and softening the woman’s accent to seem more universal. In this way, Hayes is also examining the intersection between the personal and political, here how a bodily trait affects the appearance of a governmental entity.

In conjunction with the other three films in this initial selection, the medium of artist moving image is presented for questioning through found footage, stop-motion, performance art and a silent transcript. Their concepts are more unifying, described by Taal as falling under an overarching nature of “what it is to announce, or articulate, individual and collective presence”.

For more information on screenings visit Lux Scotland. The current programme available 21^st – 24^th January.