Artists’ Film International (AFI’24)

Project 88 is proud to announce the launch of this year’s Artists’ Film International (AFI’24) - a touring film programme which is collectively curated and presented by fifteen international arts organisations and convened by Forma. AFI’24 introduces the work of talented moving image artists to worldwide audiences, and will be live over 300 days, with exhibitions, screenings and public programmes hosted across four continents.

This year the AFI partners have commissioned or selected recent artists’ films which respond to the theme ‘Solidarity’. Considering solidarity as a collective form of resistance, togetherness and interdependence, the fifteen films in AFI’24 address the ways in which solidarity is needed, sought and enacted on micro and macro scales. As a body of films, the AFI’24 programme provokes and cultivates radical imaginaries that have the potential to transform our wider, collective experience.

Project 88 nominates Aarti Sunder’s film Ghost Cut – Some Clear Pixels Amongst Many Black Boxes as our selection for Artists’ Film International 2024 this year. In this work, Aarti Sunder turns to techno-futurist ideas, through her research on the Amazon Mechanical Turk platform. Her film explores the outsourcing of labour, a precarious, isolated entity, which in turn, trains AI platforms that generate ‘objective’ data.

Solidarity itself cannot be imagined in the absence of labour; yet far too often we neglect to account for the complex nuances that define and delineate labour forces in our contemporary. Aarti Sunder’s film thinks through the theme of ‘solidarity’ by deconstructing invisible forms labour – thus in turn, becoming a critical intervention into the ways in which we imagine (and forge) the very concept of solidarity across geopolitical borders.

We’ll be screening the films at our gallery space from 11 to 20 July, which will subsequently be presented around the world at AFI’24 partner venues:

argos centre for audiovisual arts, Brussels, Belgium; Ballroom Marfa, Texas, USA; Center for Contemporary Arts Afghanistan in eXiLe e.V., (CCAA in EXiLe), Frankfurt, Germany; Cultural Center of Belgrade, Belgrade, Serbia; Forma, London, UK; Fundación Proa, Buenos Aires, Argentina; Galleria d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Bergamo (GAMeC), Bergamo, Italy; Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE), Los Angeles, USA; MMAG Foundation, Amman, Jordan; Project 88, Mumbai, India; Sapieha Palace, branch of the Contemporary Art Centre (CAC), Vilnius, Lithuania; Tramway, Glasgow, Scotland; Tromsø Kunstforening,Tromsø, Norway; Video-Forum of Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (n.b.k), Berlin, Germany.

Featured Artists:

Bahar Arfan; Deividas Vytautas Aukščiūnas; Ingrid Bjørnaali, Maria Simmons & Fabian Lanzmaier; Cassils; Collectif Faire-Part; Nadeem Din-Gabisi; Lihuel González; Rana Nazzal Hamadeh; Pınar Öğrenci; Milica Rakić; Caterina Erica Shanta; Mary Sullivan; Aarti Sunder; and more.

Aarti Sunder is an artist living and working in India (Chennai). She works with moving image, writing, drawing and painting. Her interests lie within techno-politics, focusing on the study of infrastructure and society – from contemporary labour practices, fictional edges of protest, myth, and digital-terrestrial play to expanded platform politics. Aarti published Platform Politics - Within, Above and Under, a short set of contributions that considered different readings into the idea of the platform. Ideas ranged from contemporary philosophy to online niche spaces, to education, AI/labour, and the future of gig work. Currently she is working on technology and its relationship with the spiritual, where those overlaps become a mode of governance and what kinds of visuals are born out of that relationship.

Aarti has exhibited her work at Hayy Jameel, the Singapore Biennale 22, 1ShanthiRoad, Haus der Kulturen Der Welt, MIT, Warehouse421, Goethe Insitute, Kunstverein Leipzig, BauhausImaginista, Alserkal Avenue, ISCP and the Museum of Yugoslav History. She has been the recipient of grants and fellowships from MIT, Sommerakademie Paul Klee, Ashkal Alwan, Harvard FSC Film Center, Sarai and Khoj, Akademie Der Kunstand Sharjah Art Foundation amongst others. Recent screenings of her work include the 67th BFI London Film Festival and Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin 2023. Currently her work is being shown at the Albertinum - Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden in Germany.
Ghost Cut - Some Clear Pixels Amongst Many Black Boxes, which will be a part of our exhibition next week. Stay tuned for our screening schedule!


Screening at our space 11 July onwards

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