'But Does It Speak?', Tue 21 Jan - Mon 31 Mar
Our next season will feature an incredible group of artists who use poetry, fiction, writing and speech to establish and alter visual worlds.
For the first part of the season, you'll be able to see three films in the gallery by artists Jennifer Lee Tsai, Farah Al Qasimi, and Abi Palmer.
Jennifer Lee Tsai: Fallen Star
Tue 21 Jan - Sun 2 Feb
The first film in the gallery will be Tmesis Theatre's Fallen Star, written and narrated by Jennifer Lee Tsai, who is currently in residence at the Bluecoat as part of the Wittenham Bursary. Originally commissioned and directed by Tmesis Theatre, as part of a collaborative project entitled ‘Lone Women’ with First Take, Fallen Star is a tender film about connecting and holding ancestral bodies.
The film combines Lee Tsai’s poetry with dance performed by Pei Yee Tong and music by Meike Holzmann. This combination of choreography and poetry creates moments in which the spoken word seems to compel the performer to move, and in turn, the performance seems to amplify and draw out Lee Tsai’s words.
Fallen Star, written and read by Jennifer Lee Tsai. Performed by Pei Yee Tong. Directed by Elinor Randle. Composer Meike Holzmann. Filmed & edited by First Take.
About the artist
Jennifer Lee Tsai is a poet, editor and critic. She was born in Bebington and grew up in Liverpool. A fellow of The Complete Works and a Ledbury Poetry Critic, she is the author of two poetry pamphlets Kismet (ignition press, 2019) and La Mystérique (Guillemot Press, 2022).
Her work also features in the Bloodaxe anthologies Ten: Poets of the New Generation (2017) and Mapping The Future: The Complete Works Poets (2023). She is the recipient of a 2020 Northern Writers Award for Poetry and a co-winner of the Women Poets Prize. Lee Tsai is currently in residence at the Bluecoat, as part of the Wittenham Bursary.
Farah Al Qasimi: Everybody was Invited to a Party
Tue 11 - Sun 23 Feb
Following on from Lee Tsai, the Bluecoat will screen Farah Al Qasimi’s Everybody was Invited to a Party, which takes inspiration from ‘Iftah Ya Simsim’, a 1980s Arabic version of Sesame Street, and borrows text from translation books found in London.
The film features hand-sewn puppets, voiced by the artist, and captures moments where language falters and breaks down, but in doing so opens up new avenues of meaning. The slippages in language, mispronunciations and awkward translations build a world of melancholy and humour. Everybody was Invited to a Party also features music composed and performed by Al Qasimi.
About the artist
Farah Al Qasimi makes photographs, films and music. Often working with large-scale vinyl imagery and a multiplicity of photographic prints and screens, she is interested in the internet and its hierarchies of information and emotion. Al Qasimi loves the complexity of storytelling and value-building in children's cartoons, and many of her video works include primary narrators who are anthropomorphised.
Through a highly collaborative practice, she has worked with hand-sewn puppets, falcons, African Land Snails, exorcists, and most recently, a Jack Sparrow impersonator. Her work is in the collections of MoMA New York, Tate Modern, Guggenheim New York and Abu Dhabi, and she has participated in residencies at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine, Delfina Foundation in London, and the Chinati Foundation in Marfa.
Abi Palmer: Slime Mother
Tue 4 - Sun 16 Mar
The final screening of the season will be Abi Palmer’s Slime Mother. The film combines spoken word with languorous panning shots of slugs sliding, twisting and suspending from branches.
A narrator’s voice guides us through a ‘slug-god world’, recounting memories of a childhood spent hating slugs, pouring salt and flicking them away, to a new perspective of worship, love and coexistence. Palmer’s words, combined with beautifully composed film work, transforms the slug from a hated body into the divine.
About the artist
Abi Palmer is an artist, writer and filmmaker. She uses film, text, sculpture and sensory intervention to explore sick bodies, viscous textures and ecological landscapes. She is the author of Slugs: A Manifesto (Makina Books, 2024) and Sanatorium - a fragmented memoir that jumps between a luxury thermal pool and a blue inflatable bathtub (Penned in the Margins 2020).
Artworks include mixed-media solo exhibition Slime Mother (Chapter, Cardiff, 2024); film series Abi Palmer Invents the Weather (Artangel 2023); and interactive gambling arcade Crip Casino (Tate Modern, Somerset House, Wellcome Collection, Collective Edinburgh).
