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Artists’ Film Club: Shu Lea Cheang: UKI + conversation
Institute of Contemporary Arts
Films
A group of mutant travellers with high tech bio wear gather on a rocky planet with a red sky
Shu Lea Cheang, UKI, USA / Germany 2023, 80 min.

Artists’ Film Club

The UK premiere of Shu Lea Cheang’s UKI (2023) followed by a conversation between Cheang and academic Matthew Fuller.

Set your electric sheep free range. It is 2060, what do you do with expired humanoids?

UKI’s storyline unfolds as we follow a defunct replicant REIKO dumped on Etrashville – a vast dump for tech – who tries to pull themselves back together with the help of Etrashville’s transgenic inhabitants. Parallel to REIKO’s trajectory is that of an infected city where we are made aware of the reckless schemes of the biotech enterprise GENOM Co.

The three narratives interweave in three film sets: a virtual BioNet owned by GENOM Co. takes human bodies hostage to re-engineer red blood cells into nanocomputing self-generated orgasms. BioNet collects enhanced orgasm data through handshake wet-data transmission and ultimately produces orgasmic red pills for mass consumption; a besieged diner in the city where the infected congregate to exchange own orgasm data for fresher, intenser, mutual orgasm. The diner is also the meeting place for hackers who traverse time and space, bringing in news of protest and manifestation while uncovering GENOM’s bioengineering scheme; Etrashville, set in the Deep Continent, where REIKO awakes to find their glitched body undergoing a series of transformations as they encounter the transgenic queer creatures who inhabit Etrashville.

As the plot thickens, REIKO’s body is coded, recoded and finally collapses to reemerge as UKI the Virus. Setting back GENOM’s plans, UKI the Virus seems on the brink of swarming through the infected city to liberate the red blood cells. Through virus becoming, viral love, we find a way to reclaim our viral bodies.

Following the screening artist Shu Lea Cheang will be in conversation with academic Matthew Fuller, moderated by Steven Cairns, ICA Curator of Artists’ Film and Moving Image.
A live DJ set from Mukul Patel will take place in the ICA Bar following the screening.

Shu Lea Cheang is an artist and filmmaker whose work aims to reenvision genders, genres, and operating structures. Her genre bending gender hacking practices challenge the existing operating mechanisms and the boundaries imposed on society, geography, politics and economic structures. As a net art pioneer, her work BRANDON (1998 – 99) was the first web art commissioned and collected by the Guggenheim. Her feature length films FRESH KILL (1994), I.K.U. (2000) and FLUIDø (2017), termed ecocybernoia, sci-fi cyberpunk, and sci-fi cypherpunk, seek to define a genre of new queer sci-fi cinema. From homesteading cyberspace in the ’90s to her current retreat to post-net crash BioNet zone, Cheang takes on viral love and biohacking in her current cycle of works. In 2019, Cheang presented for Taiwan at the Venice Biennale 2019 with 3x3x6.
 
Ticket information
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All films are ad-free and 18+ unless otherwise stated, and start with a 10 min. curated selection of trailers.

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