Wavelengths 2: This Suffocating Now

Bookended by films that examine the possibilities and limits of artistic refusal, this programme speaks to the political potential of creative work, creative scenes, and companionship.

In Maryam Tafakory’s Ghazal-e Sorkh, the artist returns to the Festival with a layered, lucid essay film that connects national, international, and personal histories, incorporating narrative fragments, documentaries, and industrial cinema to recount the 1976 boycott of the Shiraz Art Festival.

In TM, a newly rediscovered 8mm gem by legendary Fluxus artist and composer Takehisa Kosugi, the skies and trees in a Tokyo park are filmed through playful, lyrical in-camera effects. Effectively unseen since 1974, this new restoration by Collaborative Cataloging Japan reveals Kosugi as an unsung polymath who regrettably never pursued the form further.

Kosugi’s sunlit, sylvan experiment is balanced by Zheng Lu Xinyuan’s nocturnal Fire Flies, in which the filmmaker is led on a flashlight-illuminated stroll through the mountains — with the green, digital images of a night vision camera capturing flora, fauna, and distant stars.

Balancing paranoia with an affirming sense of social and artistic solidarity, Simon Liu’s eerie, enveloping Splits in Two takes influence from Cantonese Ghost Stories as it parses both the physical and figurative landscape of contemporary Hong Kong, a city whose underground art scene persists as a larger cultural identity risks dissipation.

The programme ends with This Suffocating Now, a vital, visceral short, in which artist Vika Kirchenbauer exploits tensions — between sound and silence, between moving and still images — to level a direct accusation against the hypocrisies of life in contemporary Germany.

JESSE CUMMING

Content advisory: strobe lighting