This exhibition brings together four films by artists whose works recently joined the LUX Collection. As we became immersed in these artists' practices, we were drawn to the ways each grapples with the fractured worlds in the wake of colonialism and state violence, where one must navigate between loss and liberation.

For this programme, we selected early and recent works from these artists that challenge and reframe the narratives of these worlds through unique moving image practices. The title ‘Imaginary Escape’ takes inspiration from a line in Suneil Sanzgiri’s film ‘At Home but Not at Home’, a reflection on the liberating power of imagination amid histories of displacement and oppression.

Some works in the programme emphasise the disruptions and gaps as sites of resistance. In ‘rial & tERROR’, Gelare Khoshgozaran weaves together fragments of pre-revolutionary Iranian media, contraband pop music and home video, inviting us to consider how imperial forces shape even our most intimate perceptions of pleasure and longing. Suneil Sanzgiri’s ‘At Home but Not at Home’ spans distances of memory, technology and liberation movements to revisit his father’s story, layering disparate media to bridge personal and political histories.

Other films explore stories of survival and defiance within oppressive landscapes. ‘Kings of the Sky’ by Deborah Stratman, follows Uyghur tightrope artist Adil Hoxur and his troupe across Xinjiang’s desert, balancing cultural tradition with the weight of political complexity. Michelle Williams Gamaker’s ‘The Silver Wave’ reimagines the journey of Ada Blackjack, an Iñupiat woman and sole survivor of a colonial Arctic expedition, through the voices of indigenous memory and objects drawn from archive.

Unfolding over seven weeks, the films in this programme offer a space to reflect on the imaginative, often unseen acts of resistance and survival.

Screening Dates:

Screening 1
3 - 10 December 2024
‘At Home But Not at Home’ (2019)
Suneil Sanzgiri
Duration: 10 minutes 55 Seconds

“In 1961, 14 years after India gained independence from Britain, the Indian Armed Forces defeated the last remaining Portuguese colonisers in the newly formed state of Goa. My father was 18 at the time, and had just moved away from his small village of Curchorem to Bombay for school when news reached him about his home—now free from the oppression of a foreign hand after 450 years of colonial rule. After spending years thinking about questions of identity, liberation, and the movement of people across space and time, I find myself returning to this period in search of moments of anti-colonial solidarity across continents. My research took me from the shores of Goa, to Indonesia, Mozambique, and Angola, finding brief links between nascent liberation movements and my father’s biography.” - Suneil Sanzgiri

Screening 2
11 - 18 December 2024
'rial & tERROR' (2011)
Gelare Khoshgozaran
Duration: 15 minutes

Through its anagrammatical title and anachronistic structure, ’rial & tERROR’ creates a fragmented, cross-generational narrative of the Iranian diaspora through moments of collective loss, longing and violent disruption. The video collage comprises pre-revolutionary Iranian TV commercials of Western commodities, Iranian 1960s psychedelic rock music, pirated tapes of American 1980s pop music videos distributed as contraband in post-revolutionary Iran, and home video. A central question to this experimental video is how the notion of pleasure is shaped through imperial, military and state violence.

Screening 3
19 December 2024 - 7 January 2025
'Kings Of The Sky' (2004)
Deborah Stratman
Duration: 68 minutes

‘Kings of the Sky’ follows tightrope artist Adil Hoxur as he and his troupe tour China’s Taklamakan desert amongst the Uyghurs, a Turkic Muslim people seeking religious and political autonomy. Adil descends from a long line of Dawaz (tightrope) performers. Since he first broke the Guinness World Record in 1997, Adil has become an inadvertent national icon for his people’s struggle, bearing uncanny resemblance to the Dawaz hero of an old Uyghur myth who once freed his countrymen from an oppressive reign of invading ghosts, an apt metaphor for the ongoing tension between the Uyghurs and the Han Chinese.

Screening 4
8 - 15 January 2025
'The Silver Wave' (2020)
Michelle Williams Gamaker
Duration: 12 minutes 12 seconds

Inspired by objects from the Arctic region in RAMM’s collection, Michelle Williams Gamaker tells the story of Ada Blackjack, an Iñupiat woman from Nome, Alaska, who became the sole survivor of a doomed expedition to Russia’s Wrangel Island in the Arctic Ocean, which aimed to claim the island for the British Empire. As the four men Ada travelled with fell ill and eventually died or disappeared in an attempt to seek help, she was left alone on the island. Ada’s diary of this ill-fated voyage, are filled with thoughts of her young son Bennet, who she had had to leave behind in a care home. Extracts from this diary provide the dialogue to the film read by Iñupiat poet and writer Carrie Ayagaduk Ojanen, from the Ugiuvamiut tribe.

Artist Biography

Suneil Sanzgiri is an artist, researcher, and filmmaker. Spanning experimental video and film, animations, essays, and installations, his work contends with questions of identity, heritage, culture, and diaspora in relation to structural violence and anti-colonial struggles across the Global South. Sanzgiri’s films offer sonic and visual journeys through family history, local mythology, and colonial legacies of extraction in Goa, India—where his family originates—deftly utilising and vividly blending together 3D renderings, drone videography, photogrammetry and lidar scanning, 16 mm film and animation, archival footage, and desktop documentary practices.

Gelare Khoshgozaran is an undisciplinary artist and filmmaker whose work engages with the legacies of imperial violence manifested in war, militarisation and borders. They use film and video to construct peripheral narratives that seek to redefine existing constructions of ‘home’ as a means of approaching new conceptualisations of belonging. Khoshgozaran has presented their work internationally, with recent exhibitions and screenings at MoMA Doc Fortnight, Delfina Foundation, Images Festival, EMPAC, MASS MoCA and the Hammer Museum. With a BA in Photography from University of Arts in Tehran (2009), and an MFA from University of Southern California (2011), they are assistant professor of art at UCLA School of Art and Architecture.

Artist and filmmaker Deborah Stratman makes work around issues of power, control and belief, exploring how places, ideas, and society are intertwined. She regards sound as the ultimate multi-tool and time to be supernatural. Her projects have addressed freedom, surveillance, public speech, sinkholes, levitation, orthoptera, raptors, comets, street drag racing, tight rope walking, evolution, extinction, exodus, sisterhood and faith. Stratman’s films and artworks have been exhibited and awarded internationally. She lives in Chicago where she teaches at the University of Illinois.

Michelle Williams Gamaker, is a London based artist filmmaker. Through an interrogation of cinema and its artifice, she proposes critical alternatives to colonial and imperialist storytelling in early 20th-century British and Hollywood studio films. Leaning into the magic of cinema, Williams Gamaker explores cinema history by using the tools of cinema against itself to sabotage the casting process and recasts characters as fictional activists.

Accessibility Information
Sensory and Content notes will be updated soon.
The films in this programme include captions.