Subversive Film: An Exercise in Assembling

An Exercise in Assembling by Subversive Film brings together fragments of militant films, made across different liberation struggles, anti-colonial struggles, social and civil rights movements, and movements for workers and migrant rights. All the scenes taken from the different films are of moments of public assembly. It is organised in four chapters: assembly as film, as liberation, as power, and as a method or tool. Rather than looking nostalgically at histories of militant cinema, the film assemblage asks what it means to assemble today: as a form of liberation, a source of collective power, and a method for producing shared political imaginaries.

The work also asks questions about art and film itself. Through showing a history of militant cinema, it also questions what is militant cinema today, what is the militant image, and how filmmakers make films about struggles which do not ‘belong’ to them. The film segments echo with the present by forming an emancipatory and hopeful collective horizon, which also holds moments of grief and hopelessness.

Artist and architect Iswanto Hartono will design the exhibition as a spatial translation of Subversive Film’s work around assembly, which will host the exhibition as well as the public programme.

This exhibition is a collaboration with NW, Open House for Contemporary Art (Aalst, B).