LUX + BIMI Present: Alia Syed, Early Films & Influences

In the context of Alia Syed’s solo exhibition at LUX Wallpaper (10 January to 10 February 2018), BIMI and LUX present an afternoon programme of screenings and conversations around her early work. Four 16mm films by Alia Syed will be shown together with works by other filmmakers – Martha Haslanger, Gunvor Nelson and  Lis Rhodes  – which Syed watched in the 1980s and were influential for Syed’s beginnings as a filmmaker. The screening programme is divided in two parts (2pm and 4pm).

Alia Syed made her early 16mm films at the London Film-makers Co-operative in the mid-1980s, using the Co-op’s optical printer as a means to explore issues of identity and representation. Her work proposes an ongoing investigation of the nature and role of language in intercultural communication, with a focus on borders and boundaries, translation and the trans-cultured self. Her films draw from personal and historical realities in order to address the subjective relationship to gender, location, diaspora and colonialism.

Programme

2pm
Swan (Alia Syed, 1986, 5min)
Unfolding (Alia Syed, 1988, 15min)
Syntax (Martha Haslanger, 1974, 13 min)
Light Reading (Lis Rhodes, 1978, 20 min)
Fatima’s Letter (Alia Syed, 1992, 20 min)

Followed by Alia Syed in conversation with Maria Palacios Cruz
4pm
Three Paces (Alia Syed, 1989, 14 min)
Red Shift (Gunvor Nelson, 1984, 50 min)