Serpent Rain was born from the discovery of a sunken slave ship, and an artist asking a philosopher - how do we get to the post-human without technology? The philosopher replied - maybe we can make a film without time.
The result is a video that speaks from inside the cut between slavery and resource extraction, between black lives matter and the matter of life, between the state changes of elements, timelessness and tarot.
As a companion to Ancestral Clouds, Ancestral Claims by Denise Ferreira da Silva and Arjuna Neuman—which will have its Canadian premiere in person at Innis Town Hall on April 13, 2025, at 2:00 PM—Images Festival is pleased to present an online program featuring the duo’s previous works.
Since 2016, Denise and Arjuna have collaborated on a series of films, each exploring a classical element (water, earth, wind, or fire) to reimagine the world through speculative and reparative lenses. Their “elemental cinema” merges poetics and critical theory, offering a poignant and emotional perspective on the ethical and political challenges of the global present from both human and non-human viewpoints.
The online program includes Serpent Rain (2016) and 4 Waters – Deep Implicancy (2018), both presented at the 2019 Images Festival, as well as Soot Breath // Corpus Infinitum (2020), which was featured in the 2021 festival.
Together, Arjuna Neuman and Denise Ferreira da Silva’s collaboration includes the film Serpent Rain (2016), 4 Waters-Deep Implicancy (2018), Soot Breath//Corpus Infinitum (2020). Their films have been exhibited at major art venues, such as the Pompidou Center (Paris), Whitechapel Gallery, The 56th Venice Biennale, The Haus Der Kulturen Der Welt (Berlin), Centre for Contemporary Art (Glasgow), Julia Stoschek Collection (Dusseldorf), Arnhem Museum (Netherland), and more. Their films have been screened at Berlinale Forum Expanded, Images Festival Toronto, Doclisboa, Pravo Lujdski and more. They were the 2021 feature artists at the Flaherty Seminar and their work is held in the Belkin Museum Collection. In 2023, they showed the ensemble of their films at the MACBA (Barcelona) and
they premiered their new film Ancestral Clouds, Ancestral Ghosts at the Kunsthalle Wien.
Denise Ferreira da Silva is an artist, philosopher and the Samuel Rudin Professor in the Humanities in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Literatures at New York University. Her artistic and academic work rejects and speculates on themes and questions crucial to contemporary philosophy, aesthetics, political theory, Black thought, feminist thought, and historical materialism. She is the author of Toward a Global Idea of Race (University of Minnesota Press, 2007), The Impagavel Divide (Workshop of Political Imagination and Living Commons, 2019), Unpayable Debt (Sternberg / MIT Press, 2022), and co-editor (with Paula Chakravartty) of Race, Empire, and the Crisis of the Subprime (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013).
Arjuna Neuman is an artist, filmmaker, and writer. His films and installations have been shown internationally, including in the Berlin Biennial, Manifesta, Sharjah Biennial and in museums such as
Centre Pompidou, Madre Museum, MAAT and Jamee Art Centre. As a writer, he has published essays in Relief Press, Into the Pines Press, The Journal for New Writing, VIA Magazine, Concord, Art Voices,
Flaunt, LEAP, Hearings Journal, Umbau and e-flux.