Soft Sacks, Velvet Dark

The screening reflects physical interconnections woven through the invisible links between inner life, viscerality and darkness.

The short films and video works presented as part of this screening depict bodies – both living and dead, human and plant – as malleable vessels of dreams, memories, wounds and stories of violence.

Ma Qiusha presents a monologue, which she delivers with a razor blade in her mouth. She recounts childhood memories in which a mother’s love is perceived as both selfless and violent.

Mai Ling challenges conventional notions of Asian femininity by drawing parallels between women’s bodies and kudzu plants. Maya Watanabe documents the interior of a skull as a complex landscape, tracing the armed internal conflicts in Peru between 1980 and 2000.

Han Mengyun uses Buddhist sutras to reflect on her own postnatal depression and explores how women’s experiences might be connected across different regions and time periods. As an essential component of the physical experience, the conceptual and visual themes of darkness and night are deepened through the multiplication of projection screens – both in terms of the perceived vulnerability they contain and in relation to the regenerative power they unleash.

Qu Chang (HKW, Berlin) and Jessica Kwok (Asymmetry Foundation, London) will give an introduction at the start of the screening.

List of works on show:

• Maya Watanabe, Bullet, 2021, 10'
• Ma Qiusha, From No.4 Pingyuanli to No.4 Tianqiaobeili, 2007, 7' 54"
• Mai Ling, Becoming Stickiness, 2023, 25’ 07”
• Han Mengyun, *Night Sutra*, 2024, 46' 13"