Come, let us soar beyond the moon… is a programme curated by Baesianz responding to pioneering artist Hamad Butt (1962-1994) and his retrospective Apprehensions at Whitechapel Gallery, taking the dream-like visual poetry of Pakeezah (1972)—a Bollywood film that featured heavily in Butt’s psyche—as our starting point.
August 14th, 6-9pm
Whitechapel Gallery
77-82 Whitechapel High St
London E1 7QX
Tracing the dance between danger and desire found within Apprehensions and the epic musical drama Pakeezah, the evening will feature a specially commissioned live performance by artist
@samielenany and a programme of short films, untangling the poetics of risk, longing, and diasporic memory, and how bodies, histories, and collective energies often exist in tension.
Complimentary iced tea and cinema snacks by
@nitesh__tailor99
Films:
Kink Retrograde (2022) by Basyma Saad
@basyyyma
Shot in 2019 in a sea-side landfill on the outskirts of Beirut, against a backdrop of environmental collapse and toxicity. In the original plot, intoxicated characters decide the social contract with sovereign powers has always been breached; they must devise a novel type of contract aware of its own abjectness, risk, and deviance—one of total kink. The remake revises and rehearses that call for a risk-aware kink.
Letter From Your Far-Off Country (2020) by Suneil Sanzgiri
@suneil_sanzgiri
Shot with 16mm film stock that expired in 2002—the same year as the state-sponsored anti-Muslim genocide in Gujarat—and filmed amid the anti-CAA protests in Delhi, the filmmaker traces lines and lineages of ancestral memory, poetry, history, songs, and ruins from his birth in 1989.
Mast-del (2023) by Maryam Tafakory
@maryamtafakory
Two women lie together in bed. As the wind bashes against the window, one recalls a past date to the cinema. Layers of found and original footage are superimposed to fill in some of the cracks, the deletions, the limits of representation. A love song that would never pass through the censors, Mast-del is about forbidden bodies and desires inside and outside post-revolution Iranian cinema.
Tickets via the link in bio 🌕🌖🌗
Flyer design by Ivy Vo
@vovynam 
