This series of artist films presents scenarios that grasp potential, build up, and let down in love. Within each, the space between the lover and their object of desire is reconsidered.
Opening the series, Michael Snow's A to Z is a cut-out animation of domestic objects and furniture. At night, in the absence of humans, cups and saucers knock over one another. Two chairs meet, sway and dance, rubbing and caressing each other under a moon. A playful pondering on love, this introduction invites us to reflect on non-human forms of kinship.
The interior is at the core of Marge Monko's Dear D, in which objects on screen take central stage. The film presents a narrator composing a love letter to a friend. Throughout the video, windows open and close, the film reflexively circling back to its own image-making process. By applying citations, Monko expands to other theories of attraction and longing.
The distance between loved ones is tangible in Maryam Tafakory’s Irani Bag. A split-screen video essay, the film deconstructs a cinematic motif in post-revolution Iran, using excerpts from films produced between 1990 and 2018. In them, the passing of a bag serves as a proxy for direct contact, highlighting the distance between two characters in love. Reflecting on a form of mediated intimacy enabled by moving image, this delicate collage-work interweaves poetry, documentary, and archival footage.
This push and pull parallels the computer-generated Galaxy in Dagmar Schürrer's film. An animated story generated by an algorithm tells the meeting of two characters, Touch and Long Swipe, who give their names to the programme. Through slight deviations in language, the film reveals how stories are expected to be told in a technologically-driven world.
Gabriel Abrantes's Artificial Humours closes the programme with a touch of romantic comedy: boy meets girl, loses her, and returns for her love... Our expectations are however subverted by a kinship that expands beyond the human realm. Blending traditions inherent in stand-up comedy and documentary, the film follows a young indigenous girl from the Xingu National Park to São Paulo, Brazil. There, she falls in love with “Andy Coughman,” a flying robot modelled after René Magritte’s spherical bells.
Seen together, the films in this programme invite us to reflect on our so-called postmodern condition and the space held for intimacy, touch, and love in today’s world.
Introductions
Michael Snow, A to Z, 1956, 16 mm film, 7 min
Marge Monko, Dear D, 2015, screen-capture video, sound, 8 min 10 sec
Maryam Tafakory, Irani Bag, 2021, video, 8 min
Dagmar Schürrer, Galaxy, 2020, video, 3 min 48 sec
Gabriel Abrantes, Os Humores Arificiais (Artificial Humours), 2016, S16 mm transferred to 2K, 29 min
Conversation and Q&A with writer Aifric Campbell
Michael Snow’s (1928-2023) practice explores a range of media—sculpture, painting, photography, holography, installation, bookwork, film, video, sound—raising questions of time, movement, and perception. As a professional jazz pianist, Snow also performed solo as well as with various ensembles, including within his long-standing band, CCMC.
Marge Monko (1976) is a visual artist who lives and works in Tallinn, Estonia. She studied at the Estonian Academy of Arts, University of Applied Arts Vienna, and Higher Institute for Contemporary Art (HISK) in Ghent. Monko works with photography, video, and installation. Her works are inspired by historical images and theories of psychoanalysis, feminism, and visual culture.
Maryam Tafakory (1987) is an artist and filmmaker whose textual and filmic collages interweave poetry, documentary, archival, and found material. She is interested in depictions of erasure and the violence of invisible regulatory bodies. Her research-based projects consider what is often neglected and discarded as trivial and excessive. She has an ongoing body of video essays in dialogue with post-revolution Iranian cinema.
Dagmar Schürrer (1980) is an Austrian digital artist based in Berlin, Germany. She works in the field of expanded animation and extended reality (XR) technologies. In her hybrid experiences, she links (neuro-)sciences, new technologies such as XR and Artificial Intelligence, digital world building and poetic interpretations of human consciousness and its environmental entanglements, to create intricate and contemplative animations and spatial multimedia installations.
Gabriel Abrantes (1984) explores cinematographic language in his films and videos – he writes, directs, produces, and occasionally acts in them. The films confront historical, social, and political themes through an investigation of post-colonial, gender, and identity questions. His work layers improbable readings, twisting traditional narratives while flirting with absurdity, folklore, humor, and politics. Building on the appropriation of Hollywood genres, and stirring it with a familiar archive of symbolic references, popular culture and contemporary anxieties, Abrantes challenges the way these visual narratives have shaped a common take on history while eroding the frontiers of this conceptual repertoire.
Aifric Campbell is the author of four novels. Her latest, The Love Makers, explores how artificial intelligence and robotics are transforming the future of human love. Her writing has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, Sunday Telegraph, The Irish Times and awards include a fellowship at UCLA and Houston Museum of Fine Arts. A former investment banker at Morgan Stanley, she became the first woman managing director on the London trading floor. Aifric received her PhD from the University of East Anglia and teaches at Imperial College London.
All Tate Modern entrances are step-free. You can enter via the Cinema entrance, left of the Turbine Hall main entrance, and into the Natalie Bell Building on Holland Street, or into the Blavatnik Building on Sumner street.
The Starr Cinema is on Level 1 of the Natalie Bell Building. There are lifts to every floor of the Blavatnik and Nathalie Bell buildings. Alternatively you can take the stairs.
There is space for wheelchairs and a hearing loop is available.
All works screened in the Starr Cinema have English captions.
- Fully accessible toilets are located on every floor on the concourses.
- A quiet room is available to use in the Natalie Bell Building on Level 4.
- Ear defenders can be borrowed from the Ticket desks.
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