Overview
Southwark Park Galleries is partnering with Forma to present Artists’ Film International 2025 ‘Dream States’ - a programme of artist films from around the globe that dismantle reality and envision alternative futures, running in Lake & Dilston galleries from 19 July - 19 October 2025.
Dream States — the 18th edition of Artists’ Film International — commences on 3 March 2025 with a visionary programme of artists’ moving image. Exploring dreaming as both a transformative state and a radical act, the films in Dream States challenge perceptions of reality and open pathways to alternative futures. Curated by Forma with 16 cultural institutions across four continents, this year’s edition showcases a remarkable cohort of artists, each selected or commissioned by an AFI’25 partner. Presented in diverse formats, including exhibitions, festivals, and screenings, AFI’25 unfolds across the partners’ venues throughout 2025, guiding global audiences through mythic worlds, dystopian landscapes, fractured memories, and speculative possibilities.
At the intersection of personal consciousness and external realities, Dream States explores the emancipatory potential of dreams, altered states, and cinematic illusion. The programme foregrounds artists who disrupt linear time, blur fact and fiction, and navigate the boundaries between memory, myth, and fantasy to reimagine the world anew. Using an array of visual strategies, from analogue footage to CGI animation, layered archival materials, special effects and AI-generated imagery, these works harness moving-image to destabilise dominant perspectives. Reflecting upon shared histories, the artists’ eclectic and surreal dreamscapes - utopian and dystopian, intimate and collective - position cinema as the crucible of dream-making and a vehicle for changemaking.
Highlights include: Turner Prize and Jarman Award shortlisted artist Sin Wai Kin’s new film The Fortress (2024), co-commissioned by Lahore Biennale Foundation and Forma, which examines the fragmented nature of human existence and critiques the notion of our singular, homogenized experience; CGI animated In Leymusoom Garden: New Sun (2024) by Heesoo Kwon, whose oneiric and unique visual language create memoryscapes of personal and community liberation; winner of the JCDecaux Audience Choice Award Mykolas Valantinas presents Lullaby's Fault (2023), a film that explores the interior of a fractured and incoherent psyche; Ahmet Rüstem Ekici and Hakan Sorar’s AI generated moving image work The Pond, Rest in Pieces (2023) explores transformation, memory, and the connection between humans and nature; Elinor O’Donovan’s playful Wild Geese 2: Wilder Geese (2023) explores environmental existentialism, offering a tantalising dream-state existence where empathy might live; the black-and-white time-lapse video Distopian Patterns (2019) by Isabelle Nouzha depicts a ‘waking nightmare’; Anca Benera and Arnold Estefan’s surreal film Rehearsals for Peace (2023) interweaves imagery of contemporised folklore traditions with military presence within a pastoral Transylvanian village; Cocoy Lumbao’s untitled film is a digitisation of 8mm analogue film captured by his parents in 1994, which uses nostalgia and memory as a form of a dream state; Anette Gellein’s Dyke Dreams (2024) takes the form of an erotic commercial that gradually transforms into a horror movie; and the visually layered and poetic film Dear Chalam (2024) by Babu Eshwar Prasad overlaps dreams and memories considering the potentialities of cinema as a vehicle for constant re-imagination.
