And place is never always and only place…

Iqbal Barkat; ALL THE LITTLE BOXES; Experimental Documentary; 8’15’’

All the Little Boxes explores representational strategies of the embodied and relational affect of sorrow and loss, linking how it is made to the processes of experiencing it. Engaging the bodily experience of grief on screen, what Laura Marks calls ‘haptic visuality’, “providing embodied knowledge in the absence of other resources”. For film scholar Sobchack, such experiments are critical as experiences of death are “always in excess of representation, and beyond the limits of coding and culture”. The film started as a collaboration with writer, Milissa Deitz who had written an essay on her bodily sensations at the death of her two year old child. In the film, this was explored through the use of a snooricam, a camera directly harnessed to Milissa’s body.


Tessa Rex; YUKON RIVER; Experimental Documentary; 11’34”

The week after I arrived in sub-arctic Dawson City in 2018, the government began building an ‘ice bridge’ with a water cannon to connect ‘West Dawson’ and Dawson City. Spraying water onto ice, onto flowing water or mostly into the cold air as it became an icy mist was a comic and tragic failed experiment. A fitting attempt to imagine something from nothing for a town whose gold-rush era colonial structures are being swallowed by the melting permafrost.


Iqbal Barkat” LIGHT IN STONES; Cine Poem; 6’44’

The imagined contemplations of a Muslim pilgrim in contemporary India. This cine-poem follows their steps and sees their thoughts through verse on-screen. Using travel footage of everyday scenes in India, Light In Stones, traverses the fears, joys, trepidations and hopes of the pilgrim. Light In Stones is constructed from my personal travel footage acquired in various parts of India. Every which way I turned my camera, I saw religion in all its manifestations. I saw Islam written into its geography. I also saw that what appears as apparent is now an impediment to a nationalist project to set Islam and Muslims as foreign. The result is a collective denial maintained through violence, destruction and erasure. The film is made in the darkness of the worsening persecution of Muslims in India. It is also in its own way a cry for the loss of what is good and beautiful in religious faith; for the potential of the ineffable to connect us with something beyond power and money.


Tessa Rex; DISPERSAL; Experimental Documentary; 8’48”
Made in collaboration with Jessie Boylan, Yul Scarf & Half Life Collective.

Nuclear events destroy time; life fundamentally changes in an instant. Wind carries atomic survivor stories across place and time as it continues to spread radioactivity across the surface of former nuclear test sites and beyond. Nuclear events unfold forever: the concept of “before” and “after” a nuclear explosion is intangible, as there is no access to the before, and the after will never arrive. The sound component utilises code created from wind data (recorded by BoM between 1955-1967 at Maralinga in South Australia) as well as testimony from atomic survivor communities in Australia. Voices and atmospheric sounds change in intensity, volume and pitch- depending on the speed and direction of the wind- forming layers of connected and dispersed stories, linking lives affected by nuclear events together in a never-ending, constantly shifting soundscape. The video pans across the Maralinga landscape, connecting the voices to places synonymous with this chapter of Australia’s dark history, a history which is still unfolding.


Kush Badhwar and Renu Savant; BRAVE REVOLUTIONARY REDUBBED; 20’

A close study of the cathartic final scene of Hindi box office hit Krantiveer (Brave Revolutionary), now a popular meme, reveals the instability of meaning and the power of one's subjectivity. Made in collaboration with Renu Savant.


Kush Badhwar, Timothee Girault and Paul Simon; TXMALL; 6’00”

In late 2021, we made a structure from wooden beams, duct tape, cardboard, styrofoam, balloons and an old bicycle wheel. We placed our structure adjacent to the T1 Mall of Tallinn and called in T2. After its disappearance, we documented T2 through people’s memory of it and as a means for the ‘copy’ to reflect on the ‘original’.


Iqbal Barkat; ANTHI; Dance Film; 9’41”

“Anthi”, Tamil for twilight, evokes a transition – from light into darkness; through the uncertainty of the future towards adaptation, meaning and hope. It is an anthem to the present. Staged in the Australian bush, veteran Bharatnatyam dancer/choreographer, Anandavalli, performs to “Mukthi Alikkum”, a Tamil song on social justice. “Mukthi Alikkum”, was written in the 19th century by South Indian composer, Gopalakrishna Barathi and is from his masterpiece, Nandanar Charitram, the opera on the life of Nandanar, one of the only Dalit saints in Hinduism. The song extends beyond its invective against oppression and violence perpetrated against Dalits (the lowest caste in India), as it also rebukes pride and ignorance, the fundamental limitations of humanity. “Anthi”, connects ancient South-Asian dance and music forms to a contemporary Australian bush setting where a cataclysm far greater than the Covid-19 pandemic is evident.


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Iqbal Barkat is a digital artist, filmmaker and a proponent and practitioner of community and participatory arts. His works are often hybrid as they emanate from real settings but include fictional elements and involve the intersection of digital media with other art forms. His most recent project is “Idam” an invocation of place inspired by ancient Tamil poetry. The poems feature as conversations across time, place and medium, between a live singer and visual projection of dance and landscapes. His most recent film is an observational documentary on a primary school in Western Sydney, "This Is Our School". Iqbal was born in Singapore where he founded the now disbanded political theatre company, Gung-ho Theatre Ensemble. He teaches screen practice at Macquarie University, Sydney.
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Tessa Rex is a documentary artist and video producer. Rex was a resident fellow at UnionDocs Centre for Documentary Art in New York and her films have played at Brooklyn Film Festival, Sydney Underground Film Festival, Taiwan International Documentary Film Festival, Arquitecturas Lisboa, CerModern, Berlin Down Under and on MUBI. Her general practise involves analogue photography experiments, video installation and collaborations from the arctic circle to the desert, looking at landscape and late capitalism. She has just completed a multi-year covert residency as the Video and Audio Director at a mass media conglomerate.
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Kush Badhwar is an artist and filmmaker operating across media, art, cinematic and other social contexts. He is interested in the ecology of sound and image across stretches of time and political change. He believes in the potential of research and collectivity. To this end, he has worked closely with wala, Word Sound Power and Khanabadosh.Selected screening or exhibition of his work includes at Addis Video Art Festival, the Flaherty Seminar, Tallinn Photomonth Biennale, Five Million Incidents, Experimenta Bangalore, Sarai Reader 09, Videobrasil, and Forum Expanded, Berlinale. He has also undertaken Pad.ma’s Fellowship for Experiments with Video Archives, India Foundation of the Arts Archival Fellowship and Künstlerhaus Büchsenhausen's Fellowship Program for Art and Theory.