In conjunction with the exhibition Bugs & Metamorphosis: Glitching Photography at theHasselblad Center, we are organizing two film screenings, featuring films that explore and relate to the exhibition’s central themes and perspectives.

This screening focuses on Bugs/Error and will showcase three films: Before the Curtain Falls by Caroline Mårtensson, Forgotten Dialogues by Isan Maher, and Bang Straws by Michelle Gamaker.

The screening is free of charge, and we will offer the audience sandwiches and coffee (limited availability, first come, first serve). The films and event will be in English.

ABOUT THE FILMS

Caroline Mårtensson
Before the Curtain Falls (8.40 min) 

In the gap of an almost closed curtain, a video collage made from three different situations and historical times is being projected. The different parts create a narrative weave and consist of observations of insects from a specific place, Steninge in Halland, where Caroline Mårtensson lives and runs Test Site Steninge, a platform for renewal in practice. The observations are interwoven with documentations from the military training fields Revingehed and Ravlunda in Skåne. At the time when the documentation was made, the military activities were relatively low which was beneficial for the biodiversity. A balance easily disordered. The film also contains amateur footage from the end of the 1960s. It was shot with a super-8-camera a few years after the release of Rachel Carsons book Silent Spring and the beginning of the modern environmental movement. Through the camera lens the fascination for everything living is recorded parallel to the garden ideals typical for that period.

We are on the verge of an ecological collapse, a dystopia that is difficult to relate to. If we are not familiar with the species in our own surroundings, and how the eco systems are connected, how will we then be able to protect them?

Isan Maher
Forgotten Dialogues  (10:05 min) 

Isan Maher’s Forgotten Dialogues portrays an exploration of memory and identity through the metaphor of a robot with a malfunctioning speech system, engaging in a mechanical dialogue with its self-generated clone. The robot embodies the immigrant experience, where, over time, individuals begin to lose parts of their original memories as they assimilate into a new society. The integration of new languages and traditions leads to the gradual fading of fragments of the past.

The film was produced at Aldea – Contemporary Art Center and supported by Kulturrådet.

Michelle Gamaker
Bang Straws  (17 min)

The Bang Straws (2021) is an aesthetically invigorating reworking of the casting process of Sidney Franklin’s The Good Earth (1937) a film notorious for a white actor’s racist portrayal of a Chinese character. German-American actress Luise Rainer won the high-profile lead of O-Lan, the farmer’s wife. To play O-Lan, Rainer wore racist “yellowface”, as so many 20th Century Hollywood and British actors did. Despite Chinese-American actress Anna May Wong’s talent and evident desire to play O-Lan, MGM refused her the lead due to the anti-miscegenation Hays Code, offering her the minor role of sex worker Lotus instead, which she refused. The Bang Straws re-casts O-Lan with a Chinese actor and reconstructs The Good Earth’s innovative Special Effects.

Image: Mads Alexander Selvig