Reverberations
Reverberations is a collaborative curatorial project that was staged with Random Headache (Short Film Distribution) in the venue All is Joy, on Soho Art Night, London, during Frieze week 9-13 October, 2024.
All is Joy is housed in the renown Warner House De Lane Lea, London film and sound studio and projection theatres, harkening to London’s film history. Art curators presented transnational artists, intermingling cultures, to re-present those underrepresented by Warner in the past. Artworks were curated to flow between two film screening theatres on different floors. The artworks echoed, yet cast a different perspective on, Random Headache’s chosen films’ thematic facets. Moreover, the exhibition explores intermedia digital art’s relationship, to past and present thematic and technical film trends, reverberating the building’s film origins in Soho.
Random Headache curated a selection of award-winning short films by contemporary Chinese filmmakers, spotlighting Chinese Directors and showcasing ‘artistic vision and cultural diversity’. Common themes between artworks and films included contemporary human, nonhuman and digital relationships, human interconnectedness and disconnectedness, in an information world that eschews authentic interpersonal communication and contact. Alongside, many filmmakers and artists discourse contemporary life’s driven pace, concepts of time and duration in a mechanized information-generated world, and inherent contemporary power dynamics. As a corollary, some filmmakers and artists also explore spiritual beliefs and life’s limits, avenues for humanness.
— Art Curators: Pon Charat, Yuying Chan, Ismini Chimona, Beverley Harrison, Soyeon Jung
Exhibited Artists
Sara Christova
Sara Christova’s intermedia practice includes painting, installation, performance and audiovisual media. She explores digital culture, philosophy and physics – our civilization’s globally networked ‘entropic nature’, notions of time in our digital era’s non-linear time, as well as ‘entwined ontologic narratives’ of contemporary life, mythology and science.
Flo Du
Gaze Series, 2022-23
In this series, Flo Du explores female desire, body politics in female - male power relations. In so doing, she subverts Laura Mulvey’s concept of film’s patriarchal gaze that objectifies women as objects of desire. Flo Du’s artworks assert her female gaze by photographing her male partner’s body. She then rephotographs these images in intimate, everyday domestic settings, as part of her ongoing research. Witnessing her female gaze, we also query self-other politics more generally, broaching Jacque Lacan’s notion of the mirror moment’s gap between perceiver and perceived.
Redgrits
Outgrown, 2024
Redgrits states “'Outgrown' (2022-23) is a 3D piece about 'leaving' home. It is a personal exploration of the self in its unborn state outgrowing a previous environment that was suppressing them. 'Home' relating to the four walls and a roof blending in with 'Home' as in the womb. The image depicts the outgrowth of my 'Hair' extending to the four walls, indicating uncontrollable growth of the self yet a subtle bodily attachment to the past. The 'Hair' extending indicates the latching of memory, which will soon unlatch completely. The second image from the series is a depiction of myself becoming more and more 'Human'.”(Redgrits)
Samantha Jiaxuan Wang
Being Nomadic, 2024
Samantha Jiaxuan Wang’s intermedia practice spans photography, painting, and moving images. In Being Nomadic, a multiscreen installation, she deconstructs societal constructs, the intricacies of memory, emotional landscapes, and identity, in relation to the collective unconscious, the prescribed and the postcolonial. She explores the potential and limitations of nomadic thinking, in our fast-flowing contemporary information age, interwoven with power dynamics and surveillance.
Margot Wilson
Portal 1: Choreography for Breath in the 6th Dimension, 2024
Margot Wilson’s Portal 1: Choreography for Breath in the 6th Dimension, 2024 expounds and recasts filmic media’s historic experimentation, reinterpreting John Henry Pepper’s illusionistic theatrical floating spectre technique, involving a projection off-stage, onto an angled screen, circa 1860-90. Wilson explores dreams, the breath, the continuum of life and death and death within life, as well as absence, presence and the liminal in-between. Her work echoes ancient Buddhist spiritual beliefs in relation to the body, while reflecting sci-fi aesthetics and propositions.
Crossing Death the Horizontal, 2024
In Crossing Death the Horizontal (2024), Wilson explores if we breathe in our ancestors, adversaries, stardust, and life-breath from the cosmos, weaving a narrative on mortality and other dimensions. In referencing, Rembrandt’s 1642, Night Watch’s glowing light in darkness, she alludes to luminance and phosphenes within the artist’s gaze.
View work on artist's website
Jiajing Zhao
Circle of Sleeplessness, 2024
While we all crave sleep, this liminal dreamy restoration can allude us, creating a vicious circle of anxiety. This audio-visual composition transforms from a nocturnal urban soundscape, into chaotic noise, signifying the mental state of sleeplessness. What follows is a sound collage that conveys attempting to force oneself to sleep.
Experience Circle of Sleeplessness
Jiajing Zhao’s temporal- spatial sound installations and performances aim to immerse the visitor’s sensorium, in the experiential and uncanny aesthetics. He collaborates with theatrical groups, other performers and installation artists to produce music and sound. His works reimagine time and delve into Henri Bergson’s concept of Duree/Durational, or the experiential dimension of time, as opposed to the mechanized time of watches. His work speaks to linear time’s demands on the psyche in contemporary society, as a ‘a flux of chaotic experiences,’ as in audio-visual work Time Flux, 2022. This theme continues in relation to sleep anxieties in The Circle of Sleeplessness.