States of Exception, Runaway Worlds
States of Exception, Runaway Worlds
States of Exception, Runaway Worlds
States of Exception, Runaway Worlds
Featured Contributors to date
Shona Illingworth – Artist | Title To Be Announced
Raya Martin – Filmmaker | Title To Be Announced
Introduction (coming soon)
Stream 2 – States of Exception, Runaway Worlds
Provocation
To what extent is this pandemic giving cover to a consolidation of state power over our lives and bodies? Can we protect public health and human rights simultaneously? And how might we contemplate the precarious relationship between pause and interruption vs. acceleration and unravelling? From biotechnology, AI and surveillance, to detentions and deportations, and from the suspension of civil liberties to the tightening of authoritarian repression: this pandemic has converged with state power (and biopower) in alarming ways. Governments are seizing opportunities presented by this crisis to intensify securitization and to normalise its extremes. Executive powers, as well as the virus and its knock-on effects (from global famine to deepening mass unemployment) are spiralling out of control. The world cleaves across fault lines: the super rich get richer and prepare their safe havens; ordinary people, exposed, fight for bare survival. Artists, filmmakers, writers and curators respond in a series of micro shorts and written texts.
Biographies
Shona Illingworth
Shona Illingworth works across a range of media including sound, film, video, photography and drawing. She is known for her immersive video and multi-channel sound installations, and evocative, research-led practice in which she explores the processes of memory, amnesia and cultural erasure and how these shape our capacity to imagine the future. She is currently working on a long-term project that examines the impact of accelerating geopolitical, technological and environmental change on the composition, nature and use of airspace and the implications for human rights. Illingworth was born in Denmark and brought up in the Highlands of Scotland. She trained as an artist at Goldsmiths College, University of London. In addition to her practice, she is currently a Reader in Fine Art at the University of Kent, an Imperial War Museum Associate and on the editorial board of the Journal of Digital War.
Her work has been exhibited internationally, with shows at the Museum of Modern Art, Bologna, FACT, Liverpool and the Wellcome Collection, London. Forthcoming solo exhibitions of her work are planned for The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery, Toronto and Bahrain National Museum in 2021. She has received art commissions from Film and Video Umbrella, the Hayward Gallery, London and Channel 4 Television.
Raya Martin
Raya Martin has directed several features and shorts — fiction, documentaries, installations, and recently performance. His films were screened at the Cannes Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival, Locarno Film Festival and New York Film Festival, among others. A program of his works has been featured in dOCUMENTA (13), Centre Pompidou, Museum of Modern Art and Museum of the Moving Image. He has recently premiered his first commercial movie, the crime drama Smaller and Smaller Circles.
Born 1984 in Manila, Philippines. Screening in competition at the Cannes Film Festival in 2009, Martin’s breakthrough feature INDEPENDENCIA was hailed as a singular mix of Filipino history and Hollywood fantasy. His other feature MANILA was also screened at Cannes in the same year, marking the first time a Filipino director had two films in the main festival. Taking striking cinematic forms, both his works are inspired by everything from Tarkovsky to The Simpsons.
Martin’s daring, restless sensibility continues to suggest new approaches to both narrative and personal history. HOW TO DISAPPEAR COMPLETELY is an unsettling atmospheric horror film with a pulsating John Carpenter-esque electronic score, that premiered at the Locarno Film Festival in 2013. In the same year he co-directed LA ULTIMA PELICULA, a nod to the Dennis Hopper’s cult classic and starring acclaimed writer/director Alex Ross Perry as an end-of-the-world filmmaker in Mexico.
He was named one of the 50 most important filmmakers under 50 by Cinema Scope Magazine. Martin’s most recent work is the feature SMALLER AND SMALLER CIRCLES, based on the best-selling Filipino crime novel by F.H. Batacan.