aemi is thrilled to welcome Maeve Brennan for a Q&A after this screening
A phrase from the 2008 Mahmoud Darwish poem quoted by Oona Mosna in reference to her programme for DISSOLUTIONS ’25, ‘Lunar Stones’ looks to complicate ideas of spectatorship explored at the outset of the festival with a conversation on modes of attention hosted with Paper Visual Art. Interconnected through instances of mirroring and pattern recognition in imagery and behaviour, the three new works in this programme – Sarah Ballard’s Full Out (2025), Callum Hill’s E-Minor (2024), and Maeve Brennan’s Siticulosa (2025) – are all screening in Ireland for the first time. By looking underneath, into tombs, basements, psyches, the films in this programme form relationships between vast disciplines of human knowledge – archaeology, geology, history and Western medicine – to reflect on the body’s capacity for knowing and the cinema’s potential to offer space for healing and contemplation.
CONTENT WARNINGS
Sarah Ballard’s FULL OUT contains flashing lights and strobe effects
FILM INFO:
Sarah Ballard, Full Out, 2025, 14 minutes
Callum Hill, E-Minor, 2024, 12 minutes
Maeve Brennan, Siticulosa, 2025, 44 minutes
Total running time: 86 minutes
Film synopses & filmmaker bios:
Sarah Ballard, Full Out, 2025, 14 minutes
In 19th century Paris at the Salpêtrière Hospital, patients were hypnotized on stage to reproduce the symptoms of hysteria for public audiences. Over a century later, high school cheerleaders are fainting en masse. Full Out is the inaugural work in a suite of films investigating the intricate threads between historical accounts of mass hysteria, the body’s capacity for knowing, and the ways collective resonance can both fracture and heal.
Sarah Ballard is a filmmaker and educator based in Milwaukee, WI. Her films understand mental illness as existing beyond the individual and explore how the body’s uncontrollable impulses can act as both a site of vulnerability and an instrument of resistance. Sarah’s work has been programmed nationally and internationally at venues and festivals such as Institute for Contemporary Arts London, Museum of the Moving Image New York, Berwick Film and Media Arts Festival, Images Festival, Crossroads, Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival, Athens International Film and Video Festival, and Antimatter [Media Art], among others. She is a 2025-2026 Mary L. Nohl Fund Artist Fellow and a recipient of the 2023 Princess Grace Award in Film. Sarah currently teaches at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee.
Callum Hill, E-Minor, 2024, 12 minutes
Combining 35mm and 16mm film and archival footage, this 13-minute piece takes viewers on a psychedelic journey to explore the shadows of Western society. E-Minor is characteristic of Hill’s approach to filmmaking, which moves between psychological enquiry, gender, politics, and poetry. Unpredictable and erratic in narrative, her films slip between documentary and fiction in their exploration of the human condition. E-Minor’s starting point is a linoleum tile depicting a clown’s face that existed in the basement of Hill’s grandparents’ home on Staten Island, New York. The clown in question was Lou Jacobs, a German-born American who became the first living person to be placed on a US postage stamp with a cartoon-like rendition of his grinning expression. The iconography of the clown, together with the pervasive pop culture metaphor of the threatening basement space, become vehicles through which Hill explores the darker side of Western cultural life by asking what lies beneath its surface.
The location of the artist’s grandparents’ home in New York takes Hill back to the city that she comes from but has never lived in. This geographic fragmentation between the US and Europe becomes the impetus for E-Minor’s weaving together of a kaleidoscopic visual essay that expands from the artist’s family history to themes of grief, time, memory, and ghosts amidst the constrictive binds of capitalism in the Western world. In addition to New York and its islands, E-Minor draws upon and includes footage captured in and around other island locales – the United Kingdom, Ireland, Sardinia– each of which represent Hill’s personal journey through pattern recognition, exploring and making visible the realities of human experience within a landscape of encroaching division and nationalism. In this, the film builds upon her previous work, Crowtrap (2018), which centred upon the UK political climate and its imminent withdrawal from the EU. Like the ubiquity of linoleum – the material in which Jacobs’ face was embedded –E-Minor pulls up a veneer to reveal a series of uninhibited and potentially liberating truths. It is a film that dwells in the spaces of confusion, fragmentation and irrationality in order to reimagine the homogenous and toxic systems that characterise contemporary Western society.
Callum Hill is a London artist working predominantly in film. Embedded with a documentary impulse, her works take root from real characters and historical events, which are refracted through the lenses of political and psychological consciousness. Often working with techniques of symbolism, metaphor and cyclical or repetitive temporalities, Callum’s recent work has explored the subject of physical and emotional borders, fire, landscapes of pressure, and the political terrains of the UK and Europe. Although her practice has increasingly focused on factual starting points that are direct, timely and accessible, Callum weaves these references together through her own intuition and memory, embracing a poetics of the image and of the mind that highlight her role as the composer of each narrative. Previous film awards include The Berwick New Cinema Award 2018 and The Aesthetica Artist Film award 2016. Her films have been screened and exhibited internationally with recent screenings at International Film Festival Rotterdam 2019 and Images Toronto 2019. She has been semi based in Ireland at the Irish Museum of Modern Art from 2019-20 developing a new film work.
Maeve Brennan, Siticulosa, 2025, 44 minutes
Siticulosa explores the journey that historical artefacts undergo over time, from everyday objects and works of art, to archaeological treasures of high historical and sometimes economic value. Set in Puglia in southern Italy, Brennan uncovers a circuit where both local inhabitants and passionate professionals are pitted against a criminal underworld. As we traverse a landscape full of caves and looted tombs, the film weaves together an interdisciplinary investigation of the ground, considering the relationship between archaeology, geology and ecology. It is a study of a territory, and the marks and wounds that it bears of a history of pillage, but also a portrait of the people that inhabit it.
Maeve Brennan is an artist and filmmaker based in London. Her practice explores the social, historical and political resonance of material and place. Working across moving image, installation, sculpture and printed matter, her works excavate layered histories, revealing the unseen structures that shape contemporary life. Recent and forthcoming presentations of her work include: Tai Kwun Contemporary (HK) Barbican Centre (UK) The High Line (NYC), Somerset House (UK), Tate Britain (UK), MAXXI Museum (IT) Kettle’s Yard (UK) VISUAL Carlow (IE) The Whitworth (UK) Lentos Kunstmuseum (AUT) Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt (DE) E-WERK Freiburg (DE) British Art Show 9 (UK) Stanley Picker Gallery (UK); Mother’s Tankstation (IE); Wäinö Aaltonen Museum of Art (FI); Chisenhale Gallery (UK) and Spike Island (UK). She was shortlisted for the Jarman Award (2024). She was awarded the Sainbury Scholarship, British School of Rome (2023), the Stanley Picker Fine Art Fellowship (2019-22), the Paul Hamlyn Award for Artists (2021) and the Jerwood/FVU Award (2018). Maeve is in residence at Somerset House Studios and her films are distributed by LUX