Ali Roche

New project complete and out in the world 🎬🔦🏺 . Maeve Brennan’s new film Siticulosa (2025), is now on view at @taikwuncontemporary in a solo exhibition curated by @tiffanywcleung Tomorrow the film has its festival world premiere at @cphdox as part of the New:Vision Award 💫 . In Siticulosa (2025), Brennan delves into the origins of the looted artefacts featured in her earlier work An Excavation (2022), tracing them back to Puglia in southern Italy. . Populating the landscape of Siticulosa are people who hold different forms of knowledge of the ground. Interviews with farmers, speleologists, geophysicists, archaeologists and agronomists speak of the soil and strata, past civilisations and looted tombs. . The ambiguous figure of the tombarolo (tomb robber) traverses the film searching the landscape at night, moving freely between the worlds of the living and the dead. Their story unfolds through fragments, rumours, and oral testimonies. The tombaroli’s illicit activities predate modern archaeology and yet embody a neglected form of local knowledge and historical intimacy with the land. . Siticulosa intricately weaves narratives of ancient history, environmental crisis, and the alternative economies of looting and trafficking. This entangled investigation of the underworld is at once material and spiritual – the ground becomes a site of human contact with the past, with death and with potential futures. . A film by @maevekrbrennan Associate Producer: @vinnienoerskov Cinematographer: @jamiequantrill Editor: @ariadna_fatjovilas Supervising Sound Editor: @tomsedg Colourist: Jason R Moffat Graphic Design: @frasermuggeridgestudio Score: Viki Steiri . Contributors: Roberto Polo, Fernando Baglivo, Dr Giovanni Giangreco, Dr Fabio Fabrizio, Cinzia Sinesi, Professor Annarosa Mangone, Marguerita Fluck, Sabino Lisanti and Ulysses, Giulia Baglivo, Lucio Gnai . An ANNWN Studios production. Commissioned by Museum of Ancient Art and Archaeology, Aarhus University and Tai Kwun Contemporary with support from @knotenpunkt.art , New Carlsberg Foundation and Danish Arts Foundation

We’re thrilled to announce that Ali Roche will be joining LUX as our new Director in April 2025! Ali is currently Chief Curator at Nottingham Contemporary and has previously held roles at Spike Island and Picture This, with a background in commissioning, developing, and producing ambitious new contemporary art and moving image projects. She has worked closely with artists including Eric Baudelaire & Alvin Curran, Maeve Brennan, Imran Perretta, Larissa Sansour, and P. Staff, with film works she has produced screening at Locarno, BFI London, IFFR, CPH:DOX, and more We’re excited to welcome Ali to LUX and look forward to the vision she will bring! Visit our website for the full announcement (link in bio) Photography by Yiannis Katsaris @ali___roche #AliRoche

This week I’m heading to @cphdox for the International premiere of @maevekrbrennan ‘An Excavation’ (nominated in the New:Vision award 🙌) This project was such a joy to be a part of ❤️ 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’ (2022) 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. Screening 22nd March (Cinematek) and 24th March (Kunsthal Charlottenborg). A film by: Maeve Brennan
With: Dr Christos Tsirogiannis, Dr Vinnie Norskov
.
Producer: Ali Roche
Cinematographer: Jamie Quantrill @jamiequantrill Editor: Ariadna Fatjo-Vilas Supervising Sound Editor: Tom Sedgwick Score: Beatrice Dillon Kanun player: Konstantinos Glynos . Commissioned by: @stanleypicker With support from: @aceagrams and Museum of Ancient Art and Archaeology, Aarhus Images 1-4: An Excavation, film stills Image 5: An Excavation, trailer (video)

Familiar Phantoms (2023), a new film by Larissa Sansour and Søren Lind premiere’s at @whitworthart This new work is Larissa’s most personal film to date, an essay film drawing on the artist’s family history in Palestine and Russia to give an intimate insight into how personal identity can be shaped by geo-political events and how the experiences of our forbearers’ imprint themselves on our lives. The film weaves together private archives, Super 8 footage, photography, and re-enacted family recollections. Come and see it if you are in Manchester, exhibition runs 2 March – 21 May 2023. . . Featuring: Leila Sansour, Maxim Sansour, Sofie Balgdiev, Kaya Sansour Lind and Anton Sansour Voice: Sofia Asir Script: Søren Lind DoP: Anna Valdez Hanks Visual Effects Design: Henrik Bach Christensen Editor: Sue Giovanni Supervising Sound Editor: Tom Sedgwick HMU Designer: Giada Venturini Set Decorator: Casey Williams . Co-commissioned by Film and Video Umbrella and the Whitworth, The University of Manchester in association with the Irish Museum of Modern Art with Art Fund support through the Moving Image Fund for Museums. Produced by Ali Roche . Duration: 41 minutes 36 seconds . Images: Familiar Phantoms film stills, courtesy of the artists’

Live performance, 21 May, 18:30 Tung Auditorium, Yoko Ono Lennon Centre, Liverpool . Larissa Sansour and Søren Lind present a special one off live audio-visual performance with Soprano Nour Darwish of their breath-taking Arabic-language opera ‘As If No Misfortune Had Occurred in the Night’. Their new 3 screen video work which is currently on display at FACT involved a brilliant team who worked on the music, sound design, costumes and visuals and for this special one off event this has been adapted for the stage 💫 . Nour’s performance will be followed by a Q&A with Larissa and Søren and a screening of their previous film, In Vitro (2019). . Book tickets here 👉fact.co.uk/opera . BTS Images: Lenka Rayn H. Video: As If No Misfortune Had Occurred in the Night, Larissa Sansour and Søren Lind, 2022, (extract)

Maeve Brennan’s An Excavation opens @stanleypicker ✨ Go see it if you can! I loved the chance to work with Maeve again on this project. We had such an amazing week shooting at the Museum of Ancient Art in Aarhus, Denmark last summer with a really brilliant bunch of people - despite the challenges of a pandemic and Brexit! . . An Excavation, documents a forensic investigation carried out by archaeologist Dr Christos Tsirogiannis into a crate of looted antiquities discovered at Geneva Freeport in 2014. The film forms part of a wider body of work presented at Stanley Picker Gallery which takes an in-depth look at the international traffic in looted antiquities and their circulation within illicit networks of looters and smugglers to auction houses and museums. . . Stanley Picker Gallery 5 May - 9 July 2022 . . A film by: Maeve Brennan With: Dr Christos Tsirogiannis, Dr Vinnie Norskov . Producer: Ali Roche Associate Producer: Victoria Tillotson Cinematographer: Jamie Quantrill Assistant Camera: Frida Martinsen Editor: Ariadna Fatjo-Vilas Supervising Sound Editor: Tom Sedgwick Colourist: Jason R Moffat Score: Beatrice Dillon Kanun player: Konstantinos Glynos . Commissioned by: Stanley Picker Gallery, Kingston University With support from: Arts Council England, Museum of Ancient Art and Archaeology, Aarhus . . Image 1: An Excavation (film still), 2022, courtesy of the artist Images 2-10: An Excavation production stills

Opening tomorrow at FACT. Larissa Sansour and Søren Lind’s ‘As If No Misfortune Had Occurred in the Night’ (2022) is a new three-screen video installation, an Arabic-language opera, performed by Palestinian soprano Nour Darwish. Presented as a single aria, the opera revolves around loss, mourning and inherited trauma. . . The score, composed by Lebanese composer Anthony Sahyoun, brings together Palestinian and European classical music traditions and is adapted from on Gustav Mahler’s ‘Kindertotenlieder’ and Paelstinian folk song ‘Al Ouf Mash'al’ (artist unknown). . . Opening at FACT, Liverpool 25 March 2022 as part of Let the Song Hold Us . . Images: Lenka Rayn H. . . Starring: Nour Darwish DoP: Anna Valdez Hanks Visual Effects Design: Henrik Bach Christensen Editor: Sue Giovanni Costume Design: Omarivs Ioseph Filivs Dinæ Music Adapted and Re-composed by: Anthony Sahyoun Supervising Sound Editor: Tom Sedgwick

Currently showing on Spike Island’s website: ‘Fi Dem III: Ancestral Interference’ a newly commissioned video work by artist and dancer Zinzi Minott (link in bio). Available to view until Thursday 26 November. Make sure to catch it if you haven’t yet! . .
‘Fi Dem’ is Zinzi Minott’s ongoing moving image project and continued investigation into Blackness and Diaspora. ‘Fi Dem III: Ancestral Interference’, like preceding instalments of Minott’s project, invokes the HMT Empire Windrush’s mid-century voyage from Jamaica to London—except now we see it placed explicitly alongside emblems of the transatlantic slave trade. Minott is aware of the slave ship’s hold, stretching across centuries of Black Caribbean history into the present; an image of Covid-19 statistics overlaid atop a slave ship diagram tells us as much. But the artist also turns our attention to the legacies of Black Caribbean life, sound, resistance and communion within its diaspora. . . Produced and commissioned by @BerwickFilmFest , @SpikeIsland and @TransmissionGlasgow #FiDem #ZinziMinott #AncestralInterference @zinziminott . . Images 1-3: Zinzi Minott, Fi Dem III: Ancestral Interference(2020), film stills. Courtesy of the artist⁣⁣ . . Closed captions available.

Last day to watch Charlotte Prodger’s ‘Stoneymollan Trail’ on @spikeisland website (link in bio). Closed captions and downloadable transcript available. . . Named after an ancient ‘coffin road’ on the west coast of Scotland, Prodger’s ‘Stoneymollan Trail’ traces a history of recent video formats as well as the artist’s personal history. The resulting single-screen video work is a meditation on memory, subjectivity and desire. It is the first in a trilogy of films including the Turner Prize award-winning BRIDGIT (2016) and concluding with SaF05 (2019), presented at Scottish Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. This autobiographical cycle traces the accumulation of affinities, desires and losses that form a self as it moves forward in time. . . ‘Stoneymollan Trail’ was presented as an installation for the first time at Spike Island in 2015 in Prodger’s solo exhibition titled ‘8004-8019’ . . Distributed by @luxmovingimage . Special thanks to @collectivetext for their work on the closed captions. . . Image: Charlotte Prodger, Stoneymollan Trail (2015) HD video, colour, sound, 43 minutes ⠀

So proud and pleased to see Imran as one of the recipients of the @tate Turner Bursaries announced this morning. It’s so well deserved, his practice and his approach is so considered, generous and questioning. Working with him on ‘the destructors’ literally brought me to tears (in a good way) on a couple of occasions. . . So many great names on the list! Congratulations to all artists awarded; Arika, Liz Johnson Artur, Oreet Ashery, Shawanda Corbett, Jamie Crewe, Sean Edwards, Sidsel Meineche Hansen, Ima-Abasi Okon and Alberta Whittle . . Image 1: installation view Spike Island , ’the destructors’, Imran Perretta (2019) Photographer: Max McClure Images 2-4: Imran Perretta, ‘the destructors’ (2019), production stills Photographer: Lenka Rayn H ‘the destructors’ was co-commissioned by @spikeisland @chisenhalegallery @whitworthart @balticgateshead 💫💫

Last 2 days to catch P. Staff’s ‘Weed Killer’ (2017), screening on @spikeisland website until 2 July (link in bio 👆) . . @patrick.staff #PatrickStaff #WeedKiller ⛓ 🌱 . . 📹 Produced by Spike Island

P. Staff's 'Weed Killer' (2017) is screening on our website until 2 July (link in bio 👆). If you haven’t seen it make sure to watch, it’s such a brilliant and beautiful work inspired by artist-writer Catherine Lord’s memoir 'The Summer of Her Baldness' (2004) – a moving and often irreverent account of the author’s experience of breast cancer. . . To accompany the screening P has made a new sound collage ‘Weed Killer: Violence Grows’, re-editing and reshaping the soundtrack, including off-cuts, rehearsals, ambient and accidental sounds from the research & production of the video. Best with headphones/eyes closed. . . We also have a new list of suggested texts and other videos to read and watch in relation to the work. . .⠀ Weed Killer was commissioned by @moca #LosAngeles and produced by Spike Island. Performed by actress Debra Soshoux, artist Jamie Crewe and P. Staff. . . Images: P. Staff, ‘Weed Killer’ (2017), video stills #P.Staff #WeedKiller @patrick.staff @spikeisland @lankatatters @jamiecrewe @m_laws @conci.a @tomsedg