Stream all films and moving image works from the Frieze Film × ICA programme, available worldwide from 8 October to 31 October.

Frieze and the ICA have curated a programme of artists’ film and moving image, coinciding with Frieze London’s 2024.

Artists:

Hamedine Kane & Ayesha Hameed 
Xin Liu
Laila Majid & Louis Blue Newby
Claudia Martínez Garay 
Onyeka Igwe
Jacolby Satterwhite
Sung Tieu

Programme Information

This film programme features works by seven artists and collaborators: Onyeka Igwe, Sung Tieu, Claudia Martínez Garay, Xin Liu, Laila Majid & Louis Blue Newby, Hamedine Kane & Ayesha Hameed, and Jacolby Satterwhite. 

Together, their films invite viewers on a journey across layered terrains of memory, power, and identity. Moving fluidly between the intimate and the expansive, these works explore the interplay between past and present, reality and imagination. 

Onyeka Igwe’s a so-called archive (2020) delves into the tensions between archive, memory, and place, uncovering layers of history embedded in urban landscapes. Similarly, Claudia Martínez Garay’s Ayataki (2022–23) weaves animation and sound to explore cultural heritage and the fragmented nature of collective memory. Sung Tieu’s One Thousand Times (Gehrenseestrasse) (2023) revisits the aesthetics of the past through Super 8 film, building a narrative that examines notions of surveillance and power structures. 

Technology emerges as both observer and participant across these films, capturing the invisible boundaries of belonging and alienation. Xin Liu’s The White Stone (2021) reflects on the intersection of technology and the body, questioning how contemporary existence is mediated through digital realms. Laila Majid & Louis Blue Newby’s south florida sky (2022) meditates on materiality and the environment, juxtaposing the natural world with synthetic realities.

Themes of migration and displacement are further explored in Hamedine Kane & Ayesha Hameed’s In the Shadow of Our Ghosts (2018), which engages in a dialogue on migration, displacement, and the construction of belonging through a deeply personal lens. Meanwhile, Jacolby Satterwhite’s Shrines (2020) merges 3D animation with elements of performance to unravel themes of queer identity, fantasy, and the fluidity of space and time.

With meditative precision, these films unravel the complexities of desire, fantasy, and the mutable nature of time. By embracing the poetic and the uncanny, they invite us to reconsider the narratives we inherit and the worlds we construct. In this programme, the familiar transforms into the enigmatic, leaving viewers lingering on the edges of what is seen and what remains just out of reach.

Film Synopses

Onyeka Igwe, a so-called archive, 2020, HD Video, colour, sound, 19 min 40 sec
Courtesy the artist and Arcadia Missa, London

In Lagos, the former Nigerian Film Unit building was one of the first self-directed outposts of the British visual propaganda engine, the Colonial Film Unit (1932–55). Today, it stands empty. Its rooms are full of dust, cobwebs, stopped clocks, and rusty, rotting celluloid film cans. The films found in this building are hard to see, not only because of their condition, but perhaps also because people do not want to see them. They reveal a colonial residue, echoed in the walls of the building itself. Meanwhile, in Bristol Temple Meads, the former British Empire and Commonwealth Museum (2002–09) was housed in the vaults of one of Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s most famous railway designs. However, it is now shrouded in ignominy after the alleged illegal sale of several items from its collection, leading to its closure. The monetisation and obscurity of its collection point to an attitude to Britain’s colonial past. a so-called archive imagines the ‘lost’ films from both of these archives, using distinctive soundscapes, choral arrangements, and a radio play within the confines of images from a disembodied tour of the exquisite corpse of an archive building.

Sung Tieu, One Thousand Times (Gehrenseestrasse), 2023, Super 8 transferred to HD video, colour, sound, 8 min 51 sec
Courtesy the artist and Emalin, London; Sfeir-Semler, Hamburg / Beirut; Trautwein Herleth, Berlin. © Sung Tieu

The year 1977 marked the conception of nine Plattenbau (panel building) residential complexes. These were to be built in the coming years on Gehrenseestrasse in Berlin’s north-eastern district of Alt-Hohenschönhausen. [...] The complex at Gehrenseestrasse 1 was part of this state-wide programme, as well as a project with a specific agenda: throughout the 1980s, it transformed into East Berlin’s largest housing complex for Vertragsarbeiter (contract workers) who came to Germany by way of labour agreements with socialist-leaning ally states, the so-called socialist Bruderländer (brother states).

One Thousand Times (Gehrenseestrasse) (2023) captured the complex in its current state. Here, detailed glimpses of the remnants of once modular rooms and close-up shots of abundant plant life within the space give a sense that time has moved on. Meanwhile, the home-made effect of the Super 8 film in which the film was shot suggests that the experiences and worldviews of the 1980s and 1990s have not entirely vanished. In contrast to calls by investors and urban planners from the city of Berlin to reinvigorate and give new life to a long-defunct complex, Tieu’s portrayal of Gehrenseestrasse 1 offers a sense of lingering continuity and resonances across other ‘worlds’ beyond the legacies of the GDR in Germany.

Text: Eva Bentcheva, ‘Gehrenseestrasse 1: Between the Worlds of Architecture and Politics’, published in Sung Tieu: One Thousand Times, Kunstmuseum Winterthur, Cologne: Snoeck, 2023

Claudia Martínez and Garay, Ayataki, 2022-23, HD Video animation, colour, sound, 14 min 40 sec
Courtesy the artist and Grimm, Amsterdam/London/New York

Ayataki (2022), an animated video and surround sound installation by the artist, was commissioned and produced by Artpace San Antonio and the Denver Art Museum, and debuted in Who Tells a Tale Adds a Tail: Latin America and Contemporary Art (2023) at the Denver Art Museum. Through visuals and a collaged original score, reinterpreted with a synthesizer by the artist, Peruvian Andean folkloric music is intertwined with Quechua church melodies, radio transmissions, Spanish dialogues, sorrowful voices, pan flutes, raging guitars, and radio commercial propaganda to relay a tale of forced displacement due to violence and war.

The radio tower, bomb cars, and burned rural houses—often targeted by the terrorist group Shining Path during the internal war in Peru—have become symbols of terror, loss, and despair of that time. This work, as a whole, is a lamentation on the Andean landscape. Social issues and historical events are presented in a non-linear narrative, and the mixed poetic and formal composition of sound constructs a solemn funeral cadence, sonically reflecting a mourning for those who did not survive the war.

Jacolby Satterwhite, Shrines, 2020, HD video and 3D animation, colour, sound, 13 min 37 sec
Courtesy of the artist and Kadel Willborn, Düsseldorf

Shrines (2020) is a single-channel 3D animation and video, and the final film of the six-part series Birds in Paradise (2018–20). The video is accompanied by an HD virtual reality video of the same name. One recurring visual theme is Satterwhite’s version of the composition The Incredulity of Saint Thomas by Caravaggio, depicting Thomas, the apostle who was sceptical of the resurrected Jesus, entering his finger into Jesus’ wound.

Figures such as hip hop icons Trina and Dev Hynes, as well as Whoopi Goldberg as Celie in the film adaptation of Alice Walker’s novel The Color Purple (1985), make appearances above multiple television screens that play images of Ku Klux Klan members lighting torches. Purple appears in much of Satterwhite’s work; it is the colour of womanism, further aligning his work with the Black femme experience as he channels Ms. Celie in a message to his fellow countrymen: ‘Until you do right by me, everything you think about is gonna crumble!’

Xin Liu, The White Stone, 2021, HD video, colour, sound, 21 min 57 sec
Courtesy the artist and Make Room, Los Angeles

When the rocket lifts off, her body falls.

For centuries, humans have built cities on the ruins of the old. Now, civilisation builds a world at its highest point: the lower Earth orbit.

This film explores a future history of rocket debris abandonment and recovery through a ‘hunt’ for rocket debris in remote areas. The protagonist ventures through valleys, villages, and deserts in southwest China, searching for debris from rockets that have fallen since the 1990s. She imagines being the first to witness a stone’s fall—either in a dramatic crash or a quiet descent, unnoticed except by animals.

In this story, the white stone is the fallen body of a rocket.

By shifting our gaze from the sky to the ground, we reconsider the lifespan of technologies, marking the terrestrial death of an extraterrestrial object.

Hamedine Kane & Ayesha Hameed, In the Shadow of Our Ghosts, 2018, HD video, colour, sound, 13 min 34 sec
Courtesy the artist and Selebe Yoon, Dakar

On 29 April 2006, a twenty-foot boat was spotted off the south-eastern coast of Barbados. On board, eleven bodies were found by coastguards, preserved and sun-dried. The ghost ship had been drifting for four months on the Atlantic Ocean. The film presents an inadequate narrative of a story that relies on media sources to evoke the complicity of the weather, ocean currents, and state violence in the ship’s journey. The glide between film and forms tests the measurement of tragedies related to crossings and immigration, highlighting the power of the sea and the horror of the figure of the ghost ship.

Onyeka Igwe, a so-called archive, 2020, HD Video, colour, sound, 19 min 40 sec.





Sung Tieu, One Thousand Times (Gehrenseestrasse), 2023, Super 8 transferred to HD video, colour, sound, 8 min 51 sec.





Claudia Martínez Garay, Ayataki, 2022-23, HD Video animation, colour, sound, 14 min 40 sec.





Jacolby Satterwhite, Shrines, 2020, HD video and 3D animation, colour, sound, 13 min 37 sec.





Xin Liu, The White Stone, 2021, HD video, colour, sound, 21 min 57 sec.







Hamedine Kane & Ayesha Hameed, In the Shadow of Our Ghosts, 2018, HD video, colour, sound, 13 min 34 sec.






Laila Majid & Louis Blue Newby, south florida sky, 2022, HD video, colour, sound, 7 min 24 sec.