Film Curation/Presentations

• Frankfurt Forms: The films of Karl Kels, exf f., Frankfurt, 2026, link
  The perception of film as a temporal medium has squarely put the relation between real and filmic time as the focus of much of 20th century’s philosophical enquiries into the medium. These cardinal tenets of time concerned Berlin-based experimental filmmaker Karl Kels, from early 1980s through to the late 2000s. Whether filmic time will emulate real time, or if it will be a composed entity is a question that has been answered differently, by those who trusted the actuality captured in a continuous shot–like Lumière brothers, Andy Warhol, and Fluxus filmmakers–from those who believed in the power of montage to sculpt time–Georges Méliès, Sergei Eisenstein, and Peter Kubelka. Kubelka, who taught Kels at the Städelschule in Frankfurt, demonstrated how montage–a rupture in the time-space continuum–could operate at the level of single frames, independent from the stabilizing continuity of a shot, that then like music, would allow film to explore rhythms, and visual symphonies. Kels veered close to Kubelka’s teachings in his early films such as Haystacks and Sluice, where through variations and repetitions, he orchestrated a filmic dance of sorts, based on the ordering of the filmed scenes using metrical montage. In Condensation Trail such thrills of rhythm in the visual field is augmented by removing scraps of the film’s emulsion from selected frames in-between, in the process, generating a playful exchange between the representational and the material attributes of the medium. Barber Shop is a departure from the earlier films. It is a portrait of a girl getting a mohawk while Kels’ camera lingers on her and the details of the shop; a fleeting reflection of the filmmaker in a shiny brass surface wraps up the film. It is an early example of Kels’ use of film as documentation and his lasting interest in portraiture. In Starlings and Cage, Kels’ focus returned to the materiality of film, albeit in a different way than in Condensation Trail. In both these films he combined progressive print generation with metrical structuring of shots, presenting unusual rhythms and textures of the image. In the former, a flock of birds and film grain combine into astonishing configurations in the sky with the moon crescent in the backdrop and in the latter, only two takes of a rhinoceros in a cage is fragmented and combined to construct a flickering, agitated motion of the animal in its enclosure that gradually wanes over time. An interest in animals is a lasting feature of Kels’ oeuvre. For Hippopotamuses, where the tension between real and composed time comes to a head, Kels filmed minute-long shots at the Schönbrunn Zoo in Vienna depicting a family of three hippos. In these shots, Kels’ observant eye searched for the infinite realisable possibilities in the unstaged documentary reality–events, objects, movements–and edited them into his own highly plastic world, but did so without camouflages or narrative urgency.
  
  
• Left-Handed Memories: The Films of Shellie Fleming, exf f., Frankfurt, 2026, link
  Shellie (Michele) Fleming (1954-2013) was a person of rare depth and sensibility. She was a collage and street artist, a revered teacher, photographer, poet, and filmmaker, who left behind a handful of films that, though relatively unknown, remain some of the most exquisitely crafted, delicately detailed, and intricately tactile films made in the 1980s and the 1990s. They are intensely personal, also amateur—as Fleming would sometimes call them—but only for the word’s etymological link to love. The quaint overlaying of images, the quivering presence of colour, and the delicate weaving of words, sounds, and music, attest to the workmanship and care that went into each film. Words in particular meant a great deal to Fleming, it is the phrases, lines, quotes, both written and spoken, and the weight they carry–in their slippery meanings, the typographic and sonic symphonies, and power to (mis)communicate–that remained her preoccupation. The films are about memory, forgetting and remembering, holding on and letting go, and all the liminal spaces of existence.
  
  
• Looking at Animals at CinemaO in Milan, Italy (22/07/2026 & 23/07/2026)
  Films by: Guy Sherwin, Rose Lowder, Joyce Wieland, Stan Brakhage, and Amy Halpern
  Looking at Animals @ CinemaO, July 22+23, 2026
  The proto-cinematic, chronophotographic locomotion studies by Eadweard Muybridge and Étienne-Jules Marey often featured animal imagery. Their separate interests in galloping horses, flying herons, and swimming skates were not so much concerned with still-life photography of the different species as they were with the mechanics of motion and thus cognitive or sensory perception. Cinema afterwards, since its birth, be it silent, scientific, Hollywood, documentary, or experimental, has often found itself populated with animals. Not only, Gelatin—made of collagen extracted from animal body parts—is an essential ingredient of film material. Filmmaker Andrew Noren even posited that before any light capturing device, the first animal eyelid was cinema, “scene one, take one”. So when Raymond Bellour remarked that there existed a primordial link between animals and cinema, he was right in more ways than one.
  In the face of catastrophic realities like climate disasters, species extinction, genocides, and algorithmic autocracy as a direct result of capitalist and neo-colonialist avarice, a reconsideration of the present anthropocentric epoch is impending. The ensuing ecological turn in Contemporary Art and by extension, artists’ moving images, has found within its fold a proliferation of animal-themed curatorial, artistic, and epistemological projects. This welcome development within the arena of film however has come with a blind spot—towards material and perceptual concerns which inextricably inform cinema’s historical link to animals. One effective strategy to betray anthropocentrism better is by undermining perception as distinct to humans. John Berger’s classic essay “Why look at animals?” is guilty of that precise anthropocentric exceptionalism: between active lookers (humans) and passive subjects (animals). Rather than abandoning film’s potential to challenge such perceptual orthodoxies in favour of its descriptive capabilities, a renewal of epistemologies of perception seems urgent. And it is here that Looking at Animals intends to intervene, from the (somewhat obvious) vantage point of zoological Experimental Cinema, by vitalising the productive contact points between representational animacy and film’s material and structural properties, towards, hopefully a more congenial inter-species future.
  
  
• Annik Leroy’s retrospective at Filmoteca de Catalunya, Barcelona, Spain (15/01/2026 – 29/01/2026), link
  Belgian filmmaker Annik Leroy’s tenderly devastating non-fiction films vacillate between the poetic and the essayistic, the personal and the political. They critically probe the history of postwar Europe, the fleeting promises of utopia never fulfilled, the darkness of its soul ever deepening, her locations–the desolate streets of Berlin, a café in Austria, the volcanic landscapes of Iceland, or the wounded city of Sarajevo–testifying a tormented history. Figures as varied as Gottfried Benn, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Ulrike Meinhof among others are summoned to exemplify resistance. Leroy’s background in photography and literature deeply informs her filmmaking, her contemplative 16mm black and white frames and the variegated literary point of departures–Jean-Michel Palmier, Claudio Magris, Ingeborg Bachmann, Hannah Arendt and others testify to that. In her films, sound, just as the images, can be romantically expressive or materially evidential. Across four feature-length and as many short films that span more than four decades, we are confronted with an oeuvre that is singular in its radical reach.
  
  
  
• L’Eau/Water (1985) by Velu Viswanadhan, Curation and Presentation, Monokino, Ostend, Belgium, 2025, link
  
  
• A Searching Eye – A Retrospective of Karl Kels, OffOff Cinema, Gent, Belgium, 2025. Part 1, Part 2

• Introduction to Mani Kaul’s Dhrupad (1983) at Duisburger Filmwoche, 2025

• A discussion with Annik Leroy and Julie Morel at Cinematek, Brussels, 2025, watch
  
  
• Collecting Images (co-curated with Daniel A.Swarthnas): Five film programs on Peter Hutton and Mark LaPore, exf f., Frankfurt, 2025, link
  
  
• Book presentation- Distant Voices + Introduction to Vers la Mer (Annik Leroy, 1999), Stations, Berlin, 2025
  
  
• Asian Voyages: Two film programs and a listening session devoted to the work of Deben Bhattacharya, Sinema Transtopia, Berlin, 2025. Film Program 1, Film Program 2, Listening session
  
  
• Sea sights (co-curated), Monokino, Ostend, 2024 link
  Films by: Jennifer Nightingale, Rose Lowder, Jun’ichi Okuyama, Peter Hutton, Arthur & Corinne Cantrill, and Amy Halpern
  

• Vedic Elementalism – The Films of Velu Viswanadhan, exf f., Frankfurt, 2024, link

• In Memoriam: Amy Halpern, exf f., Frankfurt, 2023, Program 1: Fleeting Glances, Program 2: Prolonged Looks, link

• Echoes from South Asia, Sinema Transtopia, Berlin, 2023, link
  Films by: Annabel Nicholson, Alia Syed, Mani Kaul, James Broughton & Joel Singer, Mark LaPore, Uma Segal, Yugantar Collective, Laleen Jayamanne, Velu Viswanadhan, Anuradha Chandra, and Gautam Valluri.

• Dream-Delirium-Apparition: A program of found footage films, 2020, link
  Films by: Joseph Cornell, Matthias Müller, Cécile Fontaine, Naomi Uman, and Martin Arnold.

• Through the struggle, for the struggle, Cinema Galeries & INSAS, Brussels, 2019, link
  Films by: Renate Sami & Petra Seeger, Jean-Marie Straub & Danièle Huillet, Günter-Peter Straschek, Ingemo Engström & Gerhard Theuring, Annik Leroy

• Other screenings as part of Cinema Parenthèse, Brussels, 2018-2019
  Films programs dedicated to Werner Nekes, Paolo Gioli, Emily Richardson, James Edmonds etc.

• Mythical Poetry: The Cinema of Govindan Aravindan, Close-Up Cinema, London, 2017, link

• Storm de Hirsch: Goodbye in the mirror, Close-Up Cinema, London, 2016, link