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-----Original Message----- From: Ben Cook LUX [mailto:[log in to unmask]] Sent: 03 March 2004 11:38 Subject: LUX SALON/ALIA SYED/10 March 7pm You are invited to LUX SALON: ALIA SYED Wednesday 10 March 7 for 7.30pm Screening Alia Syed's new film 'Eating Grass' (2003) alongside two other selected works, Mona Hatoum's classic 'Measures of Distance'(1988) and a rare screening of Marguerite Duras' 'Les Mains Negative' (1979) Admission to the LUX SALON is FREE but places are limited so booking is essential. To book a ticket email <[log in to unmask]> If you reserve a space but cannot attend, please let us know as it deprives others of a place. LUX SALON takes place at LUX office, 3rd Floor, 18 Shacklewell Lane, London, E8 2EZ. For directions please see http://www.lux.org.uk/directions.html. This Salon is presented with thanks to Alia Syed, Matthew Noel-Tod and CollectifJeuneCinéma, Paris Alia Syed Eating Grass UK, 2003, sound, colour, 23 mins, 16mm & video 'The title of this film actually refers to president Zulfiquar Ali Bhutto's response to India's explosion of a nuclear device in the early 1970s: He promised the Pakistani people that they too would have their own nuclear weapon even if it meant 'eating grass.' This film is a personal and almost psychological inversion of a post-nuclear landscape that spans the (middle-) east and the west. The film fuses, in a precipitous moment, a kalaedescope of past and present, the personal and the beautiful in colours of red, gold, purple, white and deep indigo. Her film-making could be compared to that of Marguerite Duras or the writing of Virginia Woolf. Alia Syed crafts the film poetically, creating a mesh of five stories emerging from London, Karachi and Lahore. Shadows trigger memories, memories relate to the times of day, the times of day to Muslim prayer... Very much a meditative film that places the beauty of fleeting experience above all else: its joys are not of conventional storytelling. This film relishes in the sites and materials from which it was made: a buzzing market in Karachi, a wet London city street, flowing material. It fascinates with how the photographs 'move,' and how the colours dance. It compels with its transformation of real moments in the past: captured, reproduced, layered and arranged. Syed's skills in cinematography and editing are magic. The film is slick, startling and delicious.' - Emma Field Mona Hatoum Measures of Distance UK, 1988, 16 mins, video Measures of Distance, a 15-minute video work, tacitly foreshadows Hatoum's evolution from the more subjective perspective of performance-based work to the sculptures and installations she has produced in the intervening decade. The video's key footage uses a visual screen of Arabic script -- taken from a series of letters between the artist and her mother -- that is superimposed over the filmed image of her mother taking a shower. The screen both frames and obscures her mother's body. In both the literal sense that it was made during a visit home, and in a broader sense as well, Measures of Distance is one of the few examples of Hatoum's work to employ direct reference to the artist's exiled condition. Hatoum, a Palestinian born in Beirut in 1952, was stranded in Europe at the outset of civil war in 1975 (the municipal airport in Beirut was closed for nine months), and decided to study art in London, where she has subsequently lived most of her adult life. In the video's soundtrack, as well as in the graphic image of text layered over flesh, Hatoum explores how degrees of proximity and separation can be conveyed by employing both concrete examples (her mother taking a shower), and more formal abstractions (text, paper, voices, a trip to Beirut). Maguerite Duras Les Mains Negatives (Negative Hands) France, 1979, 18 mins, 16mm (w subtitles) Filmed early morning on the streets of Paris in August during the annual exodus 'en vacances' by the predominantly French population of the city, Les Mains Negatives points an objective camera at the remaining inhabitants found on the city's main boulevards. In a sequence of slow tracking shots, the film reveals the groups of immigrant workers, prostitutes, and homeless who are living and working in the shadows of the seemingly empty streets. In the films' poetic voice over, Duras draws a comparison between the existence of these marginalized people in the face of the dominance of Europe and acts of the first prehistoric man who left handprints facing out to sea on the Magdalenian cave walls of southern-Atlantic Europe. The passionate words, "I cry out that I want to love you" echo through the film, connecting the symbolic act of early man against the fracas of the ocean thirty thousand years ago to the silent protest of a displaced population joined together in contemporary France. +++ ALSO THIS COMING WEEKEND: 5-6-7 March 2004 VASULKA VIDEO a weekend with two pioneers of electronic art STEINA & WOODY VASULKA This weekend of events is the first opportunity in decades to see a substantial collection of the Vasulka's early works and alongside performances and lectures at Candid Arts Trust & University of Westminster . see http://www.lux.org.uk for more details