Programme 1

Featuring works made between 1986 and 2012, this programme foregrounds Syed’s engagement with film as a material medium; her haptic cinema emphasizing the tactility of 16mm film. This is most evident in the films that open and close the programme. Made whilst studying at the Slade, Swan —1987— decontextualises close-up images of a white swan preparing for flight via repetition and framing, abstracting the natural form until it becomes a blank screen, which the viewer can project their own meaning onto. Priya —2012— repurposes an extended aerial short of a twirling Kathak dance, originally shot for Eating Grass —2003—. The 16mm footage was buried in various organic materials, deteriorating the initial image to shift cultural specificity and linear narratives of time and space. The screening also includes Unfolding —1986—, which depicts the gendered space of the launderette as both a site of oppression and possible resistance; Eating Grass, filmed in Karachi, Lahore and London, is structured into five overlapping narratives marked by the Muslim tradition of the five daily prayers; and Syed’s perhaps best known work Fatima’s Letter —1992—, a personal documentary around journeys, memories and watching in which a woman remembers her past through the faces she sees while travelling on the London Underground. Syed expresses the dislocation of the diasporic experience while questioning the role of language in structuring power relations between class, race and gender.

María Palacios Cruz