Kino/ Atelier - Program

The first monograph on the work of artist Tony Cokes, creating a visual cartography of a body of moving image work that spans twenty years.

Tony Cokes's video works are eviscerating critiques and affective art works, bringing together color theory, sound, music, and texts, and quoting a polyphony of voices including Aretha Franklin, Mark Fisher, David Bowie, Public Enemy, and Donald Trump. Combining political and social commentary with cultural theory and a critique of capitalism, Cokes's works viscerally confront the social condition, particularly the prejudices and threats suffered by black subjects. This book is the first monograph on his practice, creating a visual cartography of a body of work that spans twenty years.

It features four critical pathways into Cokes's decades-long practice, with essays contributed by notable academics, and conversations between Cokes and artist Kerry Tribe. Cokes's work deals with mediation and distribution, and the book itself becomes another conduit for the dissemination of theory, critique, and counter-narrative—a process that Cokes so powerfully engages in as an artist.

This book accompanies Cokes's solo exhibition, If UR Reading This It's 2 Late: Vol. 1–3, across three international art institutions: Goldsmiths Centre for Contemporary Art, London; Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, Harvard University; and ARGOS centre for audiovisual arts, Brussels.

Published on the centenary year of Pasolini’s birth, Pier Paolo Pasolini: Writing on Burning Paper is a dual edition that stages a dialogue between cinema today and Pasolini’s timeless films and words.

The two complementary volumes slide into one another, forming a unique set that evokes and celebrates Pasolini’s enduring influence. The smaller book features his epic autobiographical poem ‘Poet of the Ashes’, in a revised translation by esteemed poet Stephen Sartarelli; the larger book comprises original tributes by vital filmmakers from across the contemporary cinema landscape.

Twenty filmmakers shared personal reflections in the form of essays, poems, photographs, drawings and more: Catherine Breillat, Luise Donschen & Helena Wittmann, Jia Zhangke, Radu Jude, Payal Kapadia, Alexandre Koberidze, Dane Komljen, Mike Leigh, Mariano Llinás, Roberto Minervini, Valérie Massadian, Luc Moullet, Ben Rivers, Angela Schanelec, Ulrich Seidl, Basma al-Sharif, Deborah Stratman, Anocha Suwichakornpong and Gustavo Vinagre.

Dans cet ouvrage, malheureusement son dernier, Mark Fisher revisite des artefacts culturels familiers afin de cartographier les variétés de l’étrange dont ils sont porteurs. Longtemps sensible aux dimensions bizarre et omineuse qu’il devinait, sans les nommer, entre autres dans les œuvres de Lovecraft, les films de David Lynch ou les albums de The Fall, M. Fisher tente ici la synthèse essentielle d’un questionnement qui l’avait hanté, jusqu’à ce livre.

Avec son regard si particulier, celui du critique culturel tout à la fois pop et moderniste, puisant aux sources de la psychanalyse et du marxisme, Fisher se penche sur des objets sensibles pour y saisir les rapports entre présence et absence, entre ce qui devrait être mais n’est pas, ce qui ne devrait pas se présenter mais survient. C’est en compagnie de ces spectres — du titre d’un autre ouvrage — que nous sommes invités à voyager, pour questionner les formes mêmes de nos existences sociales, jusqu’aux frontières de l’étrange.

In a first-time English language translation by Cristina Viti to mark the poet’s centenary, Tenement Press will publish Pier Paolo Pasolini’s groundbreaking, filmic work of prose and verse, La rabbia / Anger.

Why is our life dominated by discontent, by anguish, by the fear of war, by war? In order to answer this question I have written La rabbia, not following a chronological or perhaps even a logical thread, but only my political reasons and my poetic sense. - Pier Paolo Pasolini

Written in response to producer Gastone Ferranti’s request for his comments on a set of newsreel items, the poet would respond with a montage of his own. Via the unfolding of a chrysalis of images, in La rabbia (1963), Pasolini’s lens pans over Soviet repression in Hungary; the Cuban revolution; (the utopian object of) space exploration; political imprisonment in Algeria; the liberation of the former European colonies; the election of Pope John XXIII; the prospect of revolution in Africa and the Middle East; in Europe and in Latin America... Here, we’ve a panoply of photorealist intimations of Pasolini’s ‘poetic sense.’ The death of Marilyn Monroe crests as an idea in this tidal pooling of reflections, and as the poet’s line lights out for conceptual rhymes and counterpoints.

In Viti’s translation, the weave of prose and poetry that forms La rabbia portrays the vitality of Pasolini’s work in its capacity to speak to both the specifics of his contexts, the character of our own present tense, and the ironic fact of a life lived against the gulf of discontent in its myriad forms. Here, we’ve a startling confrontation of a revolutionary struggle in stasis set in lines that crystallise a rallying call against blindness. ‘I’ll not have peace, not ever,’ he writes. A lucid acceptance of the poet’s restlessness, and a marker for Pasolini’s commitment to a solidarity with the oppressed that we find reaffirmed on every page, in La rabbia the poet charts how ‘the powerful world of capital takes an abstract painting as its brash banner’ in this unravelling of ‘crisis in the world.’

Contributors to Starship № 20:

Rosa Aiello, Terry Atkinson, Tenzing Barshee, Gerry Bibby, Mercedes Bunz, David Bussel, Jay Chung, Eric D. Clark, Caleb Considine, Hans-Christian Dany, Albert Dichy, Nikola Dietrich, Martin Ebner, Ruth Angel Edwards, Stephanie Fezer, Jean Genet, Simone Gilges, Julian Göthe, Michèle Graf, Selina Grüter, Ulrich Heinke, Toni Hildebrandt, Beatrice Hilke, Karl Holmqvist, Stephan Janitzky, G. Peter Jemison, Charlotte Johannesson, Julia Jost, Julia Jung, Jakob Kolding, Nina Könnemann, Lars Bang Larsen, Anita Leisz, Norman Lewis, Elisa R. Linn, Sebastian Lütgert, Vera Lutz, Chloée Maugile, Robert McKenzie, Ariane Müller, Christopher Müller, Robert M. Ochshorn, Henrik Olesen, Kari Rittenbach, Nina Rhode, Ulla Rossek, Cameron Rowland, Mark von Schlegell, Ryan Siegan Smith, Philipp Simon, Valerie Stahl Stromberg, Josef Strau, Vera Tollmann, Eleanor Ivory Weber, Camilla Wills, Amelie von Wulffen and Florian Zeyfang.

"This is the 20th issue of Starship and we are proud and very happy to present it, and mainly want to thank all the artists, the contributors, the columnists, and the people who helped us gather images of exhibitions past, and gave us texts from books not yet published. Starship never starts with a clear concept about its future content, or what could be called a theme, but always with a sort of attentive interest. The theme may develop through its columnists—we now think it is easy to distinguish lines of thoughts, images, and texts answering each other. But it surely does so out of this editorial interest that wanders, and finds, and collects, is enthusiastic about artworks, and texts, and people, and then, well, brings this all together in a magazine. This was our working mode during the past year, and the responsiveness of those who regularly write for Starship (the columnists) has shown us that out there others are involved in thoughts that run very much in parallel. It is a strange form, a magazine like this, not getting funded, appearing irregularly, but still following a sort of conventional form that shows its consistency. It is at its core an excess of producing something that might prove itself valuable and liberating in the future."
—Ariane Müller, Henrik Olesen

A unique limited edition accessible publication documenting a project to make Black Audio Film Collective’s seminal 1986 film Handsworth Songs more, and differently, accessible. Designed by Daly & Lyon it presents a new commissioned annotated audio description script from Elaine Lillian Joseph and new creative captions commissioned from the Care-fuffle Working Group alongside new essays by Clive Nwonka and Sarah Hayden.

The publication was produced in collaboration with Voices in the Gallery and with the support and advice of the UK Association for Accessible Formats and financial support from AHRC. The publication is also available in website form designed by An Endless Supply at slowemergencysiren.org.uk

A journey through the archive of BAFTA award-winning curator and film programmer, June Givanni. This private collection made public contains thousands of films from across Africa, the Caribbean and the diaspora amassed in a career spanning more than forty years. Using oral history interviews and ephemera from four film festivals as her touchstones, author Onyeka Igwe offers a way to encounter Pan-African film through the archive. 

The book starts with Third Eye, the film festival that propelled June into a career in Pan-African cinema. Through connections she made there, she travelled to FESPACO in 1985. Participating in the festival while Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso was under the leadership of revolutionary Thomas Sankara was a formative experience. In Ouagadougou she connected with film programmers Suzy Landau and Claire Andrade Watkins, who would take steps to organise Images Caraïbes, Fort de France, Martinique, 1988, and Celebration of Black Cinema, Boston, US. 

Using original oral history research with June and other key figures in Pan-African and Black British cinema, Onyeka uncovers the important role that women festival organisers, programmers and cultural workers have played in Pan-African cinema history. She conceptualises June Givanni’s Pan-African Cinema Archive (JGPACA) as a feminist counter archive that foregrounds marginalised histories and proposes a radical approach to archiving itself. In tracing and naming the cinematic legacies that ground political filmmaking practices today, she preserves June’s work, knowledge and fervour for Pan African cinema for future generations.

A special edition issue curated, designed and published by AVARIE, Paris and Labor Neunzehn, Berlin. It accompanies KAMERA SERIES, while it is an independent and valuable object to collect. The central idea that informs and directs the booklets’ montage is the interplay between the concepts of addition and subtraction. This is achieved by unveiling a missing image in the screening or an unreleased second from an artist's film, expanded to 24 pages. Additionally, each booklet contains a piece directly removed from the show.

The editing establishes a dialogue between film frames and performed writings derived from texts, scripts, storyboards, and notes. The KAMERA exhibition is consequently extended into a physical space—the book—allowing for its widespread dissemination, complementing and contrasting with its potential online occurrence.

KAMERA SERIES is a screening program of experimental films, video art works and printed matter taking place in a former GDR building in Berlin. Each event showcases a retrospective of selected films by an artist and a small exhibition of his/her publications or works on paper over a span of 4 days.

KAMERA centers on fostering a critical dialogue between different film formats and artists’ books. Through its regular occurrence, it aspires to create a space for community exchanges about contemporary image-making. KAMERA is a series conceived and curated by Labor Neunzehn and AVARIE.

Fascinated by the intersection of visual art and cinema, Helga Fanderl’s short poetic films evoke intense and sensitive experiences of the real world. Using a small hand-held super 8 camera, she creates filmic responses to her perceptions, weaving together imagery and emotions in dense, rhythmic patterns solely through in-camera editing. She presents silent films in the form of ‘compositions’, crafting unique programs for site-specific personal projections and transforming spaces into temporary cinemas.