“Animating a host of dispersed fragments from historical documents to architectural remnants and the river, Sunless Haven looks at the docklands as a resonant chamber connecting desperate worlds.” (George Clark)

Clark worked with historian Simeon Koole and Ben Mechen, sound artist Jol Thoms and performance artist Yarli Allison to imagine the experiences in, around and through the London Docklands at the turn of the 20th century. “Woven into the film are attempts to understand the docklands as a meeting place between different ecologies, enclosures and epochs, as a point of entanglement of the city and world. The film looks at ways to describe and embody these enmeshed histories from the legacy of police persecution of seaman boarding houses and Indian dockworkers know as lascars to the traces of early Chinatown in Limehouse and the experiences of London by Ayahs and Amahs, predominantly Chinese or Indian nannies brought back from the colonies and abandoned in the city after the voyage.” (George Clark)

The premiere of Sunless Haven (George Clark, 2024) will be accompanied with a selection of 35mm reels from Clark’s ongoing project Eyemo Rolls – an expanding constellation of over 200 films shot in camera since 2011 – and works by other artists. Evoking the concept of “Flowing Water Parallelisms” in Chinese poetry, this special screening curated by George Clark draws together works connected to ideas of water and liquid bodies as way to think about worlds within worlds at various border and transient zones.

Followed by a conversation with George Clark.