Curated by Mehraneh Atashi and Tabitha Steinberg

Text by Mahan Moalemi

What Remains is an online film and events programme curated by Mehraneh Atashi and Tabitha Steinberg for moving image platform, videoclub from 11 April to 22 May 2022. The programme showcases nine artists using moving image to explore collapsing relationships between history, documentary, fiction and reality.

What Remains is divided into three sections – Traces, Closeness and Forwards. Each section includes three films available for two weeks over the programme’s six weeks. Traces features artists exploring archival material to reflect on and re-imagine historical remnants. Closeness features artists exploring their own personal, familial and genealogical histories. Forwards features artists examining how technology has affected the way we view and engage with history and reality today. Although following a loosely methodical structure, What Remains explores the relationship between its sections to reflect its own inquiries into expanded notions of history.

The programme brings together artists of varying backgrounds, identities and artistic concerns, following the artists’ own investigations into multi-narrative stories and cross-linear timelines. This foregrounds connections between disparate methodologies and geographies in new and transformative ways.

An accompanying events programme expands upon these ideas to address the connecting archival, political and distributive frameworks within moving image production and display. In this way, the programme takes a critical and self-reflexive approach to its own role in examining constructions of history through moving image practice today.

A newly commissioned text by writer and curator Mahan Moalemi accompanies the programme, reflecting on the materiality of moving images in relation to movements across spatial and temporal distances, near and far. Available on the website in three parts on 11 April, 25 April and 9 May 2022.