About this Event
Solar Rites is a film screening event curated by Radical Exhibition Collective in collaboration with Sine Screen, held as part of Sine Screen’s Whose Homeland touring film season.
The event presents an artist film programme contemplating utopian possibilities through connections between myth, spirituality, and contemporary worlds- embarking upon an exploration of social and environmental shifts and a de-centering of Western approaches to futurism.
The film programme will be accompanied by a speculative vision-boarding workshop with Eastside Projects’ Incidental artist, Seema Mattu. Drawing on the world-building techniques central to her practice, Mattu invites you to manifest your own utopian futures.
Attendees are also invited to use this time to explore Eastside Project’s current exhibitions.
Film Programme:
Slow Shift (Shambhavi Kaul, India/United States, 9 mins)
In the ancient ruins of Hampi, the boundary between history and the present dissolves. Kaul captures a landscape where geological time and the movements of wild monkeys converge, reimagining an archaeological heritage site as a living, breathing "more-than-human" geography.
Elysium vô bờ (Arlette Quynh-Anh Tran, Vietnam/South Korea, 10 mins)
Set on a Mekong Delta island, this striking animation reimagines the southern Vietnamese múa bóng rỗi ritual as a catalyst for ecological revolution. As dancers invoke celestial beings, their collective spiritual power manifests to dismantle a destructive hydroelectric dam.
Melted into the Sun (Saodat Ismailova, Uzbekistan, 39 mins)
Ismailova traces the enduring ghost of Al-Muqanna, the "Veiled One," an 8th-century revolutionary mystic of Central Asia. By weaving together his proto-socialist defiance of property and land extraction with the region’s deep spiritual traditions, the film unearths a radical heritage.
Schedule:
6:00pm - 7:00pm: Drop in workshop + time to explore Eastside Project’s current exhibitions.
7:00pm - 8:00pm: Film Programme
Workshop availablility will be limited so make sure to arrive on time to secure a spot.
About the Collaborators
Radical Exhibition Collective (REC) is a Birmingham-based film collective dedicated to broadening access to film culture. Through diasporic programming and centering subaltern expression, REC creates space for independent, archival, and experimental film and moving image work that challenges dominant narratives and expands local film culture.
Sine Screen is a London-based screening collective dedicated to showcasing independent cinema and moving-image works from across East and Southeast Asia. It aims to create space for critical dialogue around dominant representations of ESEA cultures and histories through diverse programming, and has received support from the British Film Institute and Arts Council England.
Seema Mattu is a Valmiki world-building artist whose multimodal practice is framed through the logic of a speculative theme park known as SEEMAWORLD. Hosted by fantastical deities, SEEMAWORLD roots speculative storytelling in British South Asian culture and Birmingham. Through immersive environments, sculpture, animation, and folk-punk sound, these works combine filmic and spatial spectacle to subvert themes centring: systems of caste, queer desire, and technological iterations of self. Fusing cyberpunk and solarpunk imaginaries with South Asian folk culture, Mattu makes world-building somatic. SEEMAWORLD is a self-generating archive where performance and sound unite to articulate a diasporic queer British Valmiki existence.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Eastside Projects, 86 Heath Mill Lane, Deritend, United Kingdom
GBP 0.00
