This series of films is curated around Browne’s piece, Report to an Academy (2016), whose protagonist has transformed herself from a human into an octopus. Working in an impossible, Kafkaesque environment, she chose to surrender spoken language and take on the form of the agile octopus as a way to find a ‘way out’.
The other films in the programme are similarly concerned with practices of bodily exertion and effort in the service of learning, all working within and against certain constraints. Moving through the programme, the significance of the voice recedes and the other sensory capacities of the body emerge. Many of the films share a technique of a frontal address to the camera, as a singular protagonist negotiates institutions of education, illness and beauty, pushing at the limits of our sense of the possible and what bodies can (or should) do.
Pedagogue (1988), Stuart Marshall and Neil Bartlett, 11 minutes
In My Language (2007), AM Baggs, 9 minutes
Sticky Encounter (2016), Saoirse Wall, 10 minutes
Report to an Academy (2016), Sarah Browne, 28 minutes
Eyeballing (2005), Rosalind Nashashibi, 10 minutes
