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Online Screening: ‘in the house of names’ by Sulaïman Majali

Following the premiere at Glasgow Film Festival 2023, we are pleased to present a 4-week online screening of Sulaïman Majali’s Margaret Tait Award Commission, ‘in the house of names’. You will be able to watch the film on our website until March 18th.

This film is available with both captions and audio description by Collective text. Please be aware that this film contains flashing imagery, please see the sensory content drop-down below for more details.

The film failed the Harding Test with 9 incidents/​774 frames of Luminance Flash and 3 incidents/​76 frames of Red Flash. The report showed no incidents of Spatial Pattern or Extended Failure. The Harding Test is an automatic test for photosensitive epilepsy (PSE) provocative image sequences in video content.

‘in the house of names’ is a moving image work that takes the clown and the magician as devices to consider the liberatory. The work applies the poetic and conceptual strategies of the crease and the fold to move through the fugitive geography of a sleep cycle.

Walking through stages one to four of sleep, the film is inhabited by (and inhabits) an ​‘impossible protagonist’. Amidst the land-mind-body disintegration of the dream as a site and realm of exile, this impossible protagonist forms a vehicle and question in the work.

Filmed solely on the device, the work thinks towards the breakdown and dissolution of the digital and the neural as fixed spatialities and separate, confined, and defined states. In doing so, the filming device is at once a​“phone”/camera, a research tool, and a mode of production, but more than its technological application, the device becomes poetic, cinematic, and literary.

The Margaret Tait Commission is a LUX Scotland commission delivered in partnership with Glasgow Film, with support from Creative Scotland.