Present Futures Film Programme | Adham Faramawy, Louise Ahl, MHz, and Lilli Kuschel

Present Futures screening programme presents artists moving image works spanning film, visual arts and performance. The final screening “Neighbors” is accompanied by a Q&A with artist Lilli Kuschel.

Skin Flick (2019) | Adham Faramawy

Duration: 13 mins 30 secs

Skin Flick (2019) is a video work that takes the body as a starting point, using skin as a site to explore ideas of borders, boundaries, and fluid subjectivity, moving through poetry, personal anecdote, mythology, and biological and etymological histories as a way to think through touch and relating to each other.

Skin Flick premiered at Tate Britain, at a screening dedicated to Adham’s work, and has since screened internationally and toured in multiple sculptural iterations in galleries and museums.

Adham Faramawy is an artist working across media including moving image, sculptural installation, photography, painting and wall-based works to engaging concerns with materiality, touch, and toxic embodiment to question ideas of the natural in relation to marginalised communities. Faramawy’s video work ‘Skin Flick’ (2019) takes the body as a starting point, using skin as a site to explore ideas of borders, boundaries, and fluid subjectivity.

The rectangular frame contains me | Louise Ahl

Duration: 10 mins

The rectangular frame contains me is a short opera film where description manifests reality. It is a reflection on the human tendency to name, categorise and frame objects, people and actions in order to create meaning from matter. Audio description is integrated as operatic sung material in this surreal and minimalist film.

The film tells of a black void, where a human needs to constantly describe and name itself in order to exist. Like the first star on a clear night, or the big bang, its presence is discerned from the gravitational attraction of meaning rather than luminosity. It may be a haunting or a premonition, or the skin shed from a baroque jester. A voice emits from the body and sings a riddle.

The film was created as part of a research and development phase for the new opera performance Skunk without k is Sun which will premiere in October 2023 at Take Me Somewhere festival.

It was filmed at Tramway in September 2022.

Created and performed by Louise Ahl
With artistic collaborator Jo Hellier
Composed by Yas Clarke
Videography and editing by Natalie McGowan
Produced by Michael Kitchin
Audio description consultancy by Quiplash
Make-up and hair by MV Brown

Supported through The Work Room’s Residency programme, Tramway, Dance Base with funding support through Jerwood Live Work Fund and Creative Scotland.

Terra | MHz

Duration: Approx 15mins

Terra invites you to take a moment to grieve a fallen giant and become entangled in the undergrowth where the precarity and interconnectivity of everything bring both radiance and renewal.

Terra is a phantasmagoric short film exploring notions of ecological connection, rupture and lucidity. Inspired by the subterranean networks of roots, rhizomes and critters*. MHz (Directors and Scenographers) create a cinematic journey featuring contortionist Hannah Finn alongside a hypnotic soundscape from Cucina Povera.

*”critters refers promiscuously to microbes, plants, animals, humans and nonhumans, and sometimes even to machines”. (Staying with the Trouble, Donna Haraway, 2016)

Design & Direction: MHz (Dav Bernard + Bex Anson)
Contortion Artist & Choreography: Hannah Finn
Actor: Anna-Katharina Andrees
Sound Design: Cucina Provera
Director of Photography: Chih Peng Lucas Kao
Camera Assistant: Sanjeev Bejoy
Costume, Hair & Makeup Design: SaeHee Simmons
Dramaturg: Lou Cope
Movement Coach: Anna-Katharina Andrees
Edit: MHz
Producer: Feral

Supported by Creative Scotland and The British Council

Neighbors: non-human city life | Lilli Kuschel

Duration: 50 mins Screening and approx & 20 mins Q&A with Lilli Kuschel

Rapid global urbanization is one of the most prevalent drivers for the loss of biodiversity, but crows are experts in adapting to city life. "Neighbors" is an observational and poetic documentary about the parallel lives of human and non-human animals in the city. The film follows crows in Berlin, exploring a city in transformation. No music, text, or human dialogue is needed in this unique journey into post-anthropocentric ways of filming, opening up new perspectives on a more-than-human-world. In Lilli Kuschel’s artistic practice filmmaking is an act of sensing and making sense of the world through observation. In her work she discovers strangeness in the familiar, new ways of seeing the everyday, and comedy in the structural.

1 channel video, 2K(HD) DCP, 5.1 Dolby Surround, 2023, 50 min

Credits

Concept, direction, cinematography, edit: Lilli Kuschel
Sound recording: Nora Kuschel & Jaime Guijarro-Bustamante
Sound design: Jaime Guijarro-Bustamante
Foley artist: Davide Arrilucea Ozaeta
Sound mix: Jochen Jezussek
Editing adviser: Daniela Kinateder
Color grading: Anne Braun

Supported by:
KKWV Kommission für wissenschaftliche und künstlerische Vorhaben
BAS Berlin Centre for Advanced Studies in Arts and Sciences Universität der Künste Berlin

Access notes

Skin Flick: Subtitles / Transcript can be provided on request.

The rectangular frame contains me: Captioned

TERRA: Highly Visual / No or Little Text