KISS ME, GENTLEMEN – IN PURSUIT OF REALNESS

Friday, September 4th, 2015. 7:30pm. $9. Featuring works by Alexander Lorenz, Nelmarie du Preez, Sirah Foighel, Daniel Mann, Eitan Efrat, Miranda Pennell, Chelsea Knight, Michel Wenzer, Yaron Lapid, Elise Rasmussen. Discussion to follow with Chelsea Knight and Jess Wilcox. PROGRAM: Arcadia, downtown Yaron Lapid (Israel 2008) 15’ Complex Sirah Foighel, Daniel Mann, Eitan Efrat (Israel 2008) 9’ Three Poems by Spoon Jackson Michel Wenzer (Sweden 2003) 14’ Von Ordnung der Gesellschaft / Of the Order of Society Alexander Lorenz (Germany 2013) 12’30” TATTOO Miranda Pennell (UK 2001) 9’ To Stab Nelmarie du Preez (UK 2013) 45” I Lay Claim to You Chelsea Knight (USA 2009) 4’ 45” I Am Not a Man, Not Now Elise Rasmussen, Chelsea Knight (USA 2012) 9’ Total running time: 75 min. Our bodies belong to others; parents first, then lovers. A mother’s body belongs to her child. We are subjected to education systems; consumer desires demand to be satisfied through contracts of labour. Our bodies belong to institutions; institutions for criminals, the sick, and the insane; institutions in the end too, for all of us, via the medical, care, and funerary systems. When we agree to participate in films, our bodies belong to the filmmaker. A contractual agreement places the image, sound – and by metaphorical extension – the body, in the ownership of the filmmaker. Its care is entangled with the politics of filmic history and filmic experience. The filmmaker’s own body is also invested, navigating space, time, and the ‘contaminated projections’ of their own ideologies. As we watch carefully, or repeatedly, our knowledge may be ruptured, our feelings disturbed. In one way or another all the films in this programme deal with the mechanisms and technologies of entrapment: the destitute body, the incarcerated body, the body as a self-replicating system, bodies of soldiers performing military rituals, Greek mythology made contemporary through performative acts of defiance. Strategies in the pursuit of ‘realness’ range from injecting humour; others incite horror, follow a performative impulse, or straddle precariously on the ethical tightrope of representation. All point powerfully towards the condition of embodied subjects that have become specular, schizoid, internally disjointed. Selected by Minou Norouzi, filmmaker and programmer, doctoral candidate at Goldsmiths, University of London. Part of Sheffield Fringe touring program.