aemi is proud to present: ‘DISSOLUTIONS’, an experimental film festival taking place in partnership with The Complex, Dublin, on Friday 6th & Saturday 7th of September with ancillary events in partnership with Temple Bar Gallery + Studios on Friday September 6th & Sunday September 8th 2024 respectively.
DISSOLUTIONS is proudly supported by Screen Ireland and The Arts Council.
This September aemi will transform The Complex in Dublin into a new kind of artist cinema, hosting screenings, workshops, and artist talks. This inaugural iteration of ‘Dissolutions’ will include programmes and discursive events curated by aemi, Alice Quinn Banville (fanvid), Ruairí McCann (Ultra Dogme) and Helena Gouveia Monteiro.
Screenings across the three days will include a combination of features and shorts from Irish and international artists, representing a diversity of voices that reinforces the vitality of experimental film practices in and from Ireland. The core objective of this new festival is to create a unique platform to celebrate and bring new and underrepresented voices in artist film together.
Still from: ‘7362’ by Pat O’Neill, 1967, 10 minutes, color, sound, 16mm.
OPENING EVENT
Dissolutions 2024 will open with the Irish premiere of ‘The Buriti Flower’ from co-directors Joao Salaviza & Renée Nader Messora. Shot over 15 months in several villages in the Krahô territory, Central Brazil, ‘The Buriti Flower’ is the result of years of working with and alongside the indigenous communities that feature in the film. Winner of the Ensemble Prize at Cannes in 2023 where it showed as part of Un Certain Regard, the film is an example of eco-cinema at its most urgent and empathic.
Still from: The Buriti Flower by João Salaviza and Renée Nader Messora, 2023, 2hrs 3min.
Workshops and Masterclasses
The festival will begin on Friday September 6th with FORUM FILM, a new ancillary event in Studio 1 at Temple Bar Gallery + Studios from 11.30am to 1pm. This event will take the form of an open forum for artists working on analogue film. This special gathering will comprise short presentations from celluloid filmmakers about the resources currently in place for small gauge filmmakers in Ireland and proposals of how these could be strengthened and enhanced through collective effort.
The festival will then move to The Complex for a workshop from international guest artist and experimental filmmaker Laida Lertxundi. Taking place from 2pm to 5pm on Friday September 6th, this practical workshop will provide a limited number of participants with the unique chance of gaining insight into Laida’s creative process as well as hands-on experience of shooting on and recording sound for 16mm film.
Still from: In a Nearby Field By Laida Lertxundi and Ren Ebel, 16min, 35mm, color, sound, 2023
Further opportunity to engage with Laida Lertxundi’s work will take place at The Complex in the early evening of Saturday September 7th with ‘the answer is a lemon’ – Films by Laida Lertxundi, curated by artist Helena Gouveia Monteiro and projected from 16mm prints by experimental filmmaker Michael Higgins. This programme will traverse the unique film landscapes of Laida Lertxundi, guided by songs and textual fragments that simultaneously provide and resist meaning. From California deserts to city scapes and icy Norwegian waters, a syntax of affect and empathy emerges and delivers its rigorous beauty through collective gesture, observation, and movement.
Screenings and Artist Talks
The first day of events at The Complex concludes with ‘fanvid: A Mixtape’ curated by Alice Quinn Banville’. fanvid is an exciting new platform for artists to screen their work and this screening comprises a selection of works from over a hundred films that have screened with fanvid since its inception in 2022. This programme includes work by Claudine Chen, Michelle Doyle, Kerry Guinan, Megan Scott, Frank Sweeney, Venus Patel and Juno Claffey Hegarty.
© Venus Patel. Eggshells (film still), 2022.
The second day of ‘Dissolutions’ will begin with ‘Telltale Signs & Murmurations’, a programme of films from the North curated by Ruairí McCann to reflect a prismatic view, entangling and contesting notions of public and private space, ownership and ways of perception. It’s a map inscribed with landmarks by Simon Aeppli, Aoife Desmond, Seamus Harahan, Cáit & Éiméar McClay, Katie McFadden and Rabie Mustapha, and the striations of old ghosts, injustices, birds and music.
Still from: tessies, by Seamus Harahan, 2001, Country: Ireland, United Kingdom
An aemi-curated programme of Palestinian cinema will screen directly after ‘Telltale Signs & Murmurations’ on Saturday September 7th, establishing a timely dialogue between Northern Ireland and the current occupation of Palestine. This programme reflects aemi’s ongoing solidarity with Palestine and its people.
Saturday will also feature the Irish premiere of Jordan Lord’s ‘Shared Resources’ (2021) a film selected with Irish artist filmmaker Jenny Brady that interrupts the primacy of any one form of spectatorship by making accessibility a constituent element of the film.
Still from: Shared Resources by Jordan Lord, 2021, 1 hr 38min.
The programme at The Complex will conclude with a programme curated by aemi’s Daniel Fitzpatrick entitled ‘This is my happening and it freaks me out’ which will showcase a selection of psychedelic experimental short films from filmmakers Pat O’Neill, Alexandre LaRose, Jordan Belson, Mary Ellen Bute, Adam K.Beckett, and Ben Russell.
Still from: ‘brouillard #14’ by Alexandre LaRose
On Sunday September 8th ‘Dissolutions’ will conclude with a final event with aemi’s long-standing partner Temple Bar Gallery + Studios. This exciting event will take place at Dublin Port as part of ‘Longest Way Round, Shortest Way Home’, will comprise a screening and talk with Irish artist Yuri Pattison around the themes in his extraordinary current exhibition at Pump House No.2 entitled ‘dream sequence’.
The festival’s overall programme investigates diverse themes such as climate change, the devastating effects of capitalism, fiction and selfhood, family bonds, marginalised communities, the precarity of truth and collective memory with a distinct emphasis on technology and how experimental film as an independent artform has a unique capacity to reckon with these issues.
DISSOLUTIONS also kicks off a month-long nationwide celebration of experimental film that also includes events in Cork, Kilkenny and elsewhere. Cork will see the first iteration of the CineSalon Experimental Film Festival put together by filmmaker Maximillian LeCain and others while in Kilkenny filmmakers Michael Higgins and Juana Robles have programmed a series of screenings of Irish experimental film.
aemi is also very excited to work on the visual identity for this festival with a talented group of third year students within the BA Visual Communications programme at TUD; taught by Ben Readman. We look forward to collaborating further with this group as the date approaches: Angie Hogan, Daniel Kinlay, Evan Smith, Nicole Preece and Ploypailin Jitphulphon.
The Complex is the only multi-disciplinary arts centre in Dublin’s north inner city. It is committed to providing arts to all people and space to artists for all art forms. Combining sixteen studios, a large warehouse performance space and a gallery, it brings a diverse range of arts practitioners and audiences together in one dynamic place. The Complex is interested in work that is of meaningful social value and its mission is to enrich local communities and promote well-being with inspiring arts programmes.
About Temple Bar Gallery + Studios:
Temple Bar Gallery + Studios is a leading artists’ studio complex and contemporary art gallery in Dublin City Centre. A centre for creativity in the capital, we provide a place for artists to thrive and ways for you to experience contemporary art. For free. For everybody. Founded in 1983 – by artists, for artists. Our exhibitions identify Irish artists of talent at pivotal points in their practice, and introduces international artists to Irish audiences. The gallery programme presents five exhibitions per year, with a strong emphasis on solo exhibitions. We are home to Dublin Art Book Fair – Ireland’s only art book fair.
aemi is very grateful to Temple Bar Gallery + Studios for their ongoing support of our work throughout the year.