The LIMA Collection: New Work
LIMA is proud to present new works by Kent Chan, Ghita Skali, Frederique Pisuisse and Eoghan Ryan on Wednesday 28 September 2022 at 7.30 PM at LAB111 including a Q&A with Kent Chan, Eoghan Ryan and Frederique Pisuisse. The works presented at The LIMA Collection: New Work are selected by junior curator Manique Hendricks and are all connected to an overarching theme of bodies and borders. Frederique Pisuisse creates a body-mind seperation experience in I’m just lying there by warping time and stretching the body, telling the story of the female body being subjected to the male gaze. In The Invaders, Ghita Skali humorously addresses the absurdity of extreme right discourses by reversing migration flows as Europeans struggle to get to the Global South. Kent Chan examines the contexts, politics and proliferation of different aesthetics of heat in Heat Waves. pre- and post-Brexit ‘troubles’ in Northern Ireland are visualized as repetitive political theater in Eoghan Ryan’s SOD State, addressing binary contradictions of class, faith, identities and borders.
Frederique Pisuisse – I’m just lying there, 2022, 19’45”
‘I’m Just Lying There’ is a ficto-memoir about the filmmaker’s teenage relationship with her first boyfriend, a 36 year old man who was a pedophile. Through poems and pop songs, the film brings back memories of their grown-up dates. Having dinner at a restaurant for the first time without parents, or being picked up from her birthday in his Mercedes.
The coming of age film looks at the shaping experiences in which the female body is first subjected to the male gaze, and therefore becomes an object of desire. The protagonist, who is 14 years old at the time of their affair, is pulled towards the sensual experiences of being with this man, and simultaneously feels the danger in these experiences. There’s a sense of dissolution of the self. She uses her intellect to separate and watch over the body she owns, a detachment strategy, whereby the scene appears to us in birds-eye-view. The bird, a raven with a scratch on her beak, accompanies us.
‘I’m Just Lying There’ is a haunted experiential short-film with music produced especially for the film. The visuals, consisting entirely of an African snail family crawling over a naked body, allow us to perceive the tactual sensations of memories. Time is warped and the body is stretched, creating a body-mind separation experienced while watching.
Ghita Skali – The invaders (2021) 9’51”
The invaders is a well known US tv show from the seventies where aliens are invading the world. In the nineties, the french humorists les Inconnus made a remake of this tv show where the invaders are migrants living in France. Transforming the aliens into migrants is a cynical gesture which is also showing the absurdity of the extreme right discourses. This video is a remake of this remake where the world went upside down and the attraction from the Global South to Europe got reversed.
Eoghan Ryan, A SOD state, 22’03”
‘Sod’ or turf is wet fertile ground; it is also slang British for someone that is difficult or causes problems and ‘sod all’, as in – absolutely nothing. A SOD State posits pre and post-Brexit ‘Troubles’ in Northern Ireland as repetitive political theater, in which an inner demon performs binary contradictions of class, faith, identities, and borders; private, public, and political.
Kent Chan, Heat Waves, 2022. 21’20”
Heat Waves examines the contexts, politics, and proliferation of different aesthetics of heat. Aesthetics that stems from regions of the globe coloured by their solar relations bestowing heat in abundance. Aesthetics that are often generalized – charged with vibrancy, vitality, and visual complexity – that are increasingly mined at a time when the earth is simultaneously warming.
Comprising edited sequences of historical and contemporary imagery and videos (both filmed and found footage from traditional/social media), which weaves together often contradictory narratives around the tropics. Its depictions as a diseased paradise, abundant yet poor, its people energetic though lazy, and its aesthetics dynamic but lacking order.