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The French ambassador’s wife sings bleak arias behind the shutters of her fortified residence in Ouagadougou. Somalian refugees perform the epic verse of their homeland on the streets of Turin. Rock drilling turns up great chunks of the earth’s mantle in the Mojave desert, alien in winter, while dancers in their 90s turn the boulevards of Argentina into sweltering outdoor ballrooms – global visions appearing on screen.
Art can take you anywhere, and nowhere more immediately or more variously than in the ceaseless cycle of films that makes up the Artists’ Film International programme at the Whitechapel Gallery. The AFI, as it is unenticingly known, is one of the hidden treasures of the contemporary art scene in Britain. It is always there, always free and perpetually changing, with tranches of new films rolling out through the year from all over the world. They aren’t bulletins, although each brings news of elsewhere; nor are they movies in any conventional sense, although some artists work with actors, film stock and plot.
What they are, it seems to me from watching over the years, is roughly the equivalent of literature to raw knowledge: the world seen and understood through the mind and gifts of an artist. Sometimes the adjustments are minimal. A riot occurs and the camera runs, coming to a significant halt or changing sides without the mollifying explanatory voiceovers of television news. Sometimes the artist turns to pseudo-documentary, impromptu theatre, or superimposed animation. But what’s crucial is the prominence of the contemporary world. There may be themes – truth, beauty, gender – but all of these films are anchored in everyday reality.
With the latest edition comes a tremendous new work called Dun (Home), by the Turkish artist Senem Gökçe Oğultekin (born 1982). It opens with the most startling pan across the parched and stony highlands of eastern Turkey, homing in on the bare feet of a girl clambering over sharp rocks. These rocks turn out to be broken stones of spectacular ruins: octagonal churches, circular spires, the choirs and apses of ancient Christian buildings. The faces of saints have fallen from the walls, leaving ghostly white ovals; empty windows, carved of rose-red sandstone, frame from on high the plunging valleys below.
Another girl appears and the two gravitate together, twining, dancing, gliding among the ruins and the landscape like the silent ladybirds and chameleons intermittently shown in closeup. These girls might be sisters, perhaps even twins – together but opposed, alike but bent on independence. A marvellous sequence shows them with their long dark hair knotted together as they pull apart; a sibling civil war.
Even if you don’t recognise the ruins of Ani, a medieval Armenian city on the closed border with Turkey, you have the sense of a no man’s land, a world lost between two nations. Yet for each girl this place is home, so familiar one sleeps on a perilous window ledge and the other folds herself into the toppled stones of a door.
Their hands bend with the shape of the sparkling river, their mouths brush the wild flowers, their feet fit delicately between stone and crevasse as they part and reconcile and part. No other film could more perfectly convey a devastating historical impasse simply through the choreography of figures in a landscape.
It is a vivid jolt to encounter the concept of “hydrofeminism” next, in a film by the Argentinian artist Fannie Sosa (if such a concept really exists). I Need This in My Life examines the healing powers of sonic vibration in women’s bodies, which contain a higher proportion of water than men’s. This power is revealed in bowls of water, and then – or so it seems – in women apparently high as kites with the direct application of bass vibrations to their bodies. Sosa herself is a droll presence throughout, and her real objective is surely to screen dramatic footage of Latin American women drumming and chanting as an antidote to the idea of sonic weapons as a means of brutal oppression.
She speaks throughout, but the final film in this AFI edition has only a few words in Vietnamese. Summer Siesta: 6th Hour Counting from Dawn, by Nguyen Hai Yen, feels outstandingly remote. It shows villagers in some far-flung province with mirrors for faces, so that each reflects the rocks, trees and waterfalls around them. Literally, these figures are disappearing into their own landscape.
Of course this film might mean something different to a Vietnamese viewer, but art is a lingua franca. The mirror reflections start to look like watercolour paintings of the real landscape around them, just as the people turn to face each other, setting up a concatenation of Vietnamese landscapes. The film is slow, beautiful and transporting to watch; it brings Vietnam right into the gallery, while remaining mesmerising in its utter strangeness.
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