Event

Art and film lovers can explore the shortlist for this year’s prestigious Film London Jarman Award when the nationwide touring programme comes to Towner. 

Join shortlisted artist Maeve Brennan for a screening of her work An Excavation followed by an in-conversation with artist and Devonshire Collective Programme Fellow Sam Kaufman.

After a short break, works by the other five shortlisted artists, Larry Achiampong, Melanie Manchot, Rosalind Nashashibi, Sin Wai Kin and Maryam Tafakory will be presented.  

• - Larry Achiampong, A Letter (Side B) (2023), 20’

• - Melanie Manchot, Liquid Skin (2023), 23’

• - Rosalind Nashashibi, The Invisible Worm (2024), 17’

• - Sin Wai Kin, Dreaming the End (2023), 21’

• - Maryam Tafakory, Nazarbazi (2022), 19’

All the films will be captioned.

We have a budget available to make this event as accessible as possible – this can include further interpretation services or other access arrangements we can meet to enable you to participate. If you require access arrangements, please email programme@townereastbourne.org.uk two weeks before the event date so that we can book a service if needed.

Thank you to the Devonshire Collective for supporting this event.

Maeve Brennan is an artist and filmmaker based in London. Her practice explores the 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 determine our lived environment.

Brennan’s work has been exhibited and screened internationally. Her work was featured in British Art Show 9 and she has a forthcoming solo exhibition at Tai Kwun Contemporary, Hong Kong. She received the Jerwood/FVU Award (2018); Stanley Picker Fine Art Fellowship (2019–22); Sainsbury Scholarship, British School at Rome (2023) and is a CIRCA PRIZE 2024 finalist. Brennan is currently in residence at Somerset House Studios, London.

Sam Kaufman is an artist-filmmaker and PhD researcher at Kingston School of Art. At the moment, he works with moving image, text and sound to explore the construction of nonhuman worlds and spaces in which ecological knowledge is produced. He is currently developing a project about cephalopods, trickery, scientism and laboratories, working alongside researchers at the Comparative Cognition Lab in Cambridge. He has screened work widely in festivals and galleries, and has led talks and seminars on experimental and essay filmmaking, the politics of de-extinction and animal semiotics. He is a Programme Fellow at Devonshire Collective in Eastbourne and runs Volta, a monthly forum for artists' moving image in locations along the south-east coast.

Maeve Brennan, An Excavation (2022) 20’

In 2014, 45 crates of looted antiquities were discovered at Geneva Freeport in a warehouse belonging to disgraced antiquities dealer Robin Symes. They contained tens of thousands of archaeological remnants worth around £7 million. Three of the crates were sent to forensic archaeologists Dr Christos Tsirogiannis and Dr Vinnie Norskov for research. An Excavation documents Tsirogiannis and Norskov’s investigation into a series of vases from the Geneva Freeport crates. Made in the 4th century BC by Apulian artisans, these vases remained buried in tombs for 2500 years before they were clandestinely excavated from their now irrecoverable contexts. The objects’ journeys through the hands of looters, smugglers, restorers and dealers are counterpointed by the hand-painted stories that adorn them. Made for burials, the vases depict scenes from the underworld – forensic and mythological narratives start to intertwine.

Larry Achiampong, A Letter (Side B) (2023)
A Letter (Side B) looks at the affective impact of history, immigration and geographical separation on two brothers living in Britain and Ghana. The film collapses time, exploring how the past interrupts and impacts in the present and incorporates recent footage filmed by Achiampong in Ghana as well as archival footage from The Museum of African Art: The Veda and Dr Zdravko Pečar Collection in Belgrade, Serbia.

Speaking from a deeply personal perspective, the film additionally utilises older technologies from a 'hacked' Game Boy Camera, which Achiampong modified to enable the capture of moving images via HDMI. Through the marriage of storytelling and the use of retro technology, the exploration of time travel and the concept of ‘Sanko-time’ becomes possible. Coined by Larry in 2017, the term relates to the Ghanaian Adinkra symbol and indigenous Akan term ‘Sankofa’, meaning to ‘go back and retrieve’.

Melanie Manchot, Liquid Skin (2023)
Filmed between dusk and dawn, Liquid Skin follows nine women, all performing night-time labour, including a baker, pole dancer, care worker, nightclub security. Filmed on infrared in

single-shot sequences the work raises questions on gendered experiences of the night, while drawing attention to the hidden labour and backstage rhythms of our contemporary societies.

Rosalind Nashashibi, The Invisible Worm (2024)
The Invisible Worm is a funny / serious film with spontaneous moments of joy, physicality and thinking aloud. The subtext of the film is the mythical persona of the artist, and how artist friends lean in to one another, leading to both innocent and corrupted effects. Nashashibi’s long term collaborator Elena Narbutaitė is the film’s protagonist and co-writer, and other artist protagonists include a male model, Nashashibi’s teenage son Pietro and a cat called Brother Alyosha. Marie and Rosalind appear, as do their works, their studios and the gallery where they showed together.

William Blake’s poem ‘The Sick Rose’ from 1794 is a recurring text throughout the film. The invisible worm appears itself, at first as an embarrassing ‘hair in the gate’ stuck on the surface of the 16mm film, then mutating into an animated worm. It can be read as a note of corruption entering on multiple levels, that of the individual through over-awareness through the creative process itself, at the level of desire in late capitalist society when the worm travels across the temptingly glamorous images of a fashion magazine and finally with the worm penetrating UK Parliament building at Westminster, highlighting the ongoing imperialist actions of the British political establishment, a three-fold face of corruption.

Sin Wai Kin, Dreaming the End (2023)
Filmed on location in 2022, Dreaming the End questions the role of storytelling against the historic city of Rome. By referencing classical sculpture and cinematic genres including the Italian Giallo films of the 60’s and 70’s, the film asks: where does authenticity end and performance begin? Who decides this? Dreaming the End interrogates how the repetition and retelling of stories and mythology constructs a collective sense of reality, offering metamorphosis and the possibility of transformed perspectives.

Maryam Tafakory, Nazarbazi (2022)
Nazarbazi [the play of glances] is a film about love and desire in Iranian cinema where depictions of intimacy and touch between women and men are prohibited. The film focuses primarily on images of women whose bodies have been erased and victimised in post-revolution cinema, and alludes to discreet forms of communication that operate within, yet also circumnavigate the censors. It attempts to touch the spaces we cannot touch; inner feelings/sensations – but also untouchability beyond physical contact: unspoken prohibitions/regulators that may only unveil as embodied experiences. The film uses poetry and silence as the only language/s with which we can attempt to touch these spaces of socio-political ambiguities.