WHAT REMAINS
11 April - 22 May 2022
Seecum Cheung, George Clark, Onyeka Igwe, Bahar Noorizadeh, Josèfa Ntjam, Naïmé Perrette, Mamali Shafahi, Oraib Toukan, Geo Wyeth
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.
Supported by Arts Council England.
Produced by Michael Crowe.
About the Curators
Mehraneh Atashi (b. 1980, Tehran, Iran) is a non-binary POC, artist and photographer living and working between Washington DC and Amsterdam. They earned their BFA in photography in Tehran (2002) and Postgraduate education at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam (2014). Their work unfolds between the time of the self and the time of the world through an excavation of memories, archiving and documentation of the self. Atashi’s work has recently been shown in London (V&A; British museum), Amsterdam (DeAppel; Framer Framed), Graz (Kunsverein), Paris (Palais de Tokyo), Los Angeles (REDCAT), Antwerp (MHKA; Lodger), Salzburgh (Kunstverein), Eindhoven (MU Art Space), Athens (State of Concept), Washington DC (The Corner), Rotterdam (Tent) and The Hague (Nest).
Tabitha Steinberg (b. 1992, London, UK) is a curator and writer living and working in Los Angeles, CA. She received her Postgraduate Diploma in Curating from Goldsmiths University (2021) and is currently studying on the MA in Aesthetics and Politics at CalArts (2023). She received her BA in English Literature from Sussex University (2014) and a Fine Art Diploma from The Art Academy, London (2017). Steinberg currently runs the apartment gallery, Larder in LA and the curatorial project, 650mAh. She has curated exhibitions and projects at 4649 (Tokyo), Arcade (London), BQ (Berlin), Haus N (Athens) and Paris Internationale (Paris). She has written for publications including Art Monthly and Frieze.
About the Writer
Mahan Moalemi is a PhD student in the Department of Art, Film, and Visual Studies at Harvard University. He is the co-editor of Ethnofuturisms (Merve Verlag, 2018) and has most recently contributed essays to artist monographs by The Otolith Group (Archive Books, 2021) and Zach Blas (Sternberg Press, 2022).