The Screening Program is a new initiative that supports artists working across video, film, and screen-based practice to present work in a dedicated screening space at Firstdraft. the screening program runs from August until November and offers multiple perspectives responding to two curatorial premises.
All four films will screen at our August 18th Exhibition Opening, for one night only. After that, visit Firstdraft at the individual screening dates to view the films that make up Peripheries and Anthropocene.
18 August - 8 September:
Peripheries - Reclaiming power
(run time: 12:28 mins)
BLACK PEOPLE CAN'T DANCE by Lilah Benetti
What of the proximate future? What of next year, next week, tomorrow? Black People Can’t Dance is attentive to the possibilities of our immediate future. Despite its seemingly playful title, the experimental film sheds light on how Black people are being excluded from spaces they have created, highlighting the intersectional experiences of Black Queer people.
Workaround by Amy Prcevich
With wry humour Workaround draws on office tropes and the conventions of the instructional video to present a series of strategies used to claim time and space for art making in the context of the office. Informed by her embodied experience as an artist-arts worker, the workaround strategies celebrate the artistic impulse to agitate, rebel, resist and destabilise by offering an alternative possibility of how artistic labour can be maintained and supported.
9 September - 1 October:
Anthropocene - Unstable world
(run time: 32:41 mins)
Paranoid Escapes by Jacqui Shelton
Jacqui Shelton wanted to reconsider common formats for moving-image works and how their spatiality changes the perception of time, such as the experience of scrolling and clicking through information and images on the internet. In this doom scroll work, images appear and disappear onscreen, moving between foreground and background to create an interchangeable and fluid space. Shelton use vocal humming in the work to reference a bodily tremor and think through the affective impacts of climate colonialism on embodied experience.
MUMS ARE REAL by Samuel Mountford
Mothers past, present and future gather at the so-called "end of the world". A state of imminent climate catastrophe has been declared and everyone loving outside of urban centers must relocate to camps in the major cities Four young women gather at the home of an elderly friend for a last supper together; one with an infant daughter, two heavily pregnant and the fourth convinced that the government is covering up a more sinister plan. Mums Are Real is a fable of intergenerational friendship, hopeful conspiracies and existential despair set in lutruwita/Tasmania.
