ArchiveExhibition

Sulaïman Majali: ‘in the house of names’

7 Sep-3 Nov 2024

LUX

London N19 5JF

Overview

LUX is pleased to present a new solo exhibition by Sulaïman Majali, ‘in the house of names’, a Margaret Tait Award 2022 commission, presented in collaboration with LUX Scotland.

‘in the house of names’ is a moving image work that takes the clown and the magician as devices to consider the liberatory. The work applies the poetic and conceptual strategies of the crease and the fold to move through the fugitive geography of a sleep cycle.

Walking through stages one to four of sleep, the film is inhabited by (and inhabits) an ‘impossible protagonist’. Amidst the land-mind-body disintegration of the dream as a site and realm of exile, this impossible protagonist forms a vehicle and question in the work, escaping language to think out of time with the image.

Filmed solely on the device, the work thinks towards the breakdown and dissolve of the digital and the neural as fixed spatialities and separate, confined and defined states. In doing so, the filming device is at once a “phone”/camera, a research tool and a mode of production, but more than its technological application, the device becomes poetic, cinematic and literary.

Working with the archival, constructed, (re)staged, costumed, remote, translated, refused, imagined, disrupted and encountered, ‘in the house of names’ engages the studio as itself a site of rupture and methodology of collapse to produce film as a ‘thinking and thinkable thing’. Through treating site, production and research as entangled processes, ‘in the house of names’ reveals an editorial and compositional geometry that plays between sleep, seasonal and solar/lunar cycles, in which ‘narrative is best left to its own devices’.

‘in the house of names’ will be accompanied by captions and audio description by Collective Text.

The film contains flashing lights from 52:52 to 53:04.

The screening schedule will be announced soon.

Artist Biography
Sulaïman Majali (b.1501) is concerned with thinking practice that engages image, sculpture, sound and writing expansively. Considering art as an already thinking and speaking thing, Majali brings into play rupturing, grieving and dreaming as methodologies of collapse, fleeing towards poetic and conceptual strategies to undergo the liberatory in the neurodigital, psychospiritual, ontoepistemological or otherwise (already), anyway.

Exhibitions and events include; love after the disappearance of the world (2023), part of Open Secret, Pastor Projects/IMAC Casa de La Cultura, Tecata/Tijuana, Mexico; Skēnē Gallery, Malmö, Sweden; Millenium Film Workshop, New York City, “USA” (2024). in the house of names, Grand Union, Birmingham, (2024). in the house of names, Margaret Tait Commission Premiere, Glasgow Film Festival, (2023),THE FUTURE IS DEAD LONG LIVE THE FUTURES, part of Age of Many Posts expanded public programme, The Barbican, London, England (2022). ripe fruits before battle, part of breathe, spirit and life 呼吸、靈魂與生命, The Bluecoat, Liverpool, England (2022). Arab resting by a stream, part of Meet me at the threshold, Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh, Scotland (2022). false dawn, a solo exhibition at Studio Pavillion for Glasgow International Biennial 2021. IMG_5917, produced with Camara Taylor, commissioned by Artists’ Moving Image Festival, GIVE BIRTH TO ME TOMORROW: PART 6, LUX Scotland, “online” (2021). assembly of the dispersed, part of The Internet of Things, Darat al-Funun, Amman, Jordan/”online” (2020). strange winds, a sound commission for The Common Guild’s In The Open (2020). a dream for scheherazade, EVERYTHING HAPPENED SO MUCH, 66th International Film Festival Oberhausen, Germany (2020). saracen go home, a solo exhibition at Collective Gallery, Edinburgh, Scotland (2019). something vague and irrational, Celine Gallery, Glasgow, Scotland (2019). Mene Mene Tekel Parsin, Wysing Arts Centre (2017). towards an archive, 8th Cairo Video Festival (2017).

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