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Artists’ Moving Image Programme: Alien Body, Human Dreams (18*) + ScreenTalk

Queer East Festival

Still from Garden Amidst The Flames

Centring the body, these films construct their own embodied and multifaceted ways of being.

Alien Body, Human Dreams is a series of cinematic investigations that centre the body as a potent site of hybridity, rejecting false divisions of man/woman, human/animal/alien, and self/other to construct their own embodied and multifaceted ways of being.

Artists in this programme purposefully employ queering as a technique to misread, re-appropriate, and puncture the systems of power projected onto the body. In these works by queer Southeast and East Asian filmmakers, we meet a speculative reality where human body parts are sold in food trucks and witness a dance-fight between a lion dancer and a contemporary dancer. Bodyhacking, ritualising, and ceremonialising is used to knead cosmologies, folding knowledges in upon themselves. 
 
 

Programmed by April Lin 林森 

The programme will be followed by a Q&A hosted by curator April Lin 林森 with filmmakers Soojin Chang (BXBY) and Aileen Ye (beast).

Content Warnings:
This programme contains flashing lights.
Please note BXBY contains scenes of a graphic nature which viewers may find distressing. See below for more details.

This is screening as part of Queer East Festival.

Content warning

Programme

to boyhood, i never knew him 

Words from a transgender man float to the surface as fleeting memories go on. 

Vietnam, Canada 2022 dir Trâm Anh Nguyễn 3 min 

 

Longing for the Sun to Set Upwards 

An ode to the multiplicity, mutability, and expansion of what constitutes a body and a self, through imaging and technological mediations. 

Philippines 2022 dir Jao San Pedro 3 min 

 

beast 

A martial arts inspired dance-fight between a lion dancer and queer performer reflects the tension between traditional and modern identities. 

Netherlands 2022 dir Aileen Ye 6 min 

 

Disease of Manifestation 

The work builds itself towards the anarchistic conditions of the inner scenes, can also be seem as a wrong-manifesto. 

Taiwan 2011 dir Tzu-An Wu 9 min

 

Yummy Body Truck

A fictional food truck selling human body parts mixed with other organisms in a biotechno-queer fantasy of interspecies mixing. 

Netherlands 2021 dir Noam Youngrak Son 7 min 

 

BXBY

In this self-recorded performance blending documentary and ritual practice, a hybrid creature attempts reproduction. 

Content Warning: Please note BXBY contains scenes of a graphic nature which viewers may find distressing, including explicit nudity, and graphic scenes of the preparation of a dead animal.

UK 2022 dir Soojin Chang 37 min 

 

Garden Amidst the Flame 

A playful and imaginative fantasy that challenges the hypermasculine presentation of Minahasan ritual culture and everyday life. 

Indonesia 2022 dir Natasha Tontey 28 min 

Cinema 2

Location
Barbican Cinema 1 is located within the main Barbican building on Level -2. Head to Level G and walk towards the Lakeside Terrace where you’ll find stairs and lifts to take you down to the venue floor.   

Address
Barbican Centre
Silk Street, London
EC2Y 8DS

Public transport
The Barbican is widely accessible by bus, tube, train and by foot or bicycle. Plan your journey and find more route information in ‘Your Visit’ or book your car parking space in advance.