Unstill Image

A sovereign gaze always fixes us within a single frame, one shot, a capture—in the prison cell, on the border shoreline under watch, the street in revolt, or the city under bombardment. The works in Unstill Image both submit to and sabotage that capture. Here, vision is blurred, saturated, withdrawn, or blacked out altogether: a cinematic rehearsal of freedom; sight narrowed by exile; perception torn between what happens on the street and what is projected on the screen; an actress who withholds her image; and finally, the image’s disappearance into a black field that leaves only imagination. When power reduces each of us to a single frame, can we move out of it together by moving with moving images?

Unstill Image gathers paired and impaired gazes that strain the single frame, convening multiple agents of the moving-image world in a shared field of looking.

An imprisoned filmmaker, Çiğdem Mater, imagined into freedom in Zeynep Dadak and Çiçek Kahraman’s Weird Absurd Whatever, where rehearsal becomes a fragile space to think and speak with someone the state has excised from view. The double shoreline of Sofia Dona’s Katarakt, filmed from the village of Katarraktis on the island of Chios, where a fixed strip of sea between Greece and Turkey becomes a blurred horizon through which a WWII refugee and a contemporary political exile look toward—and away from—their lost homelands. Arief Budiman’s Last May in Theaters, where ticket sellers in Jakarta and Gwangju stay at the cinema counter while uprisings rage outside, remembering revolt as an endless war film the screen could never translate. In Elisabeth Subrin’s Manal Issa, 2024, a Lebanese Arab actress revisits questions once posed to Maria Schneider—whose exploitation in Last Tango in Paris hangs heavily over the conversation—while an empty balcony in Beirut under bombardment holds the frame. And Clint Enns’ [ pink noise ], a silent cinematic text in which a black screen and closed captions, drawn from the SRT file, invite spectators to “see” only through imagination. Across these correspondences—freedom/incarceration, exile/homeland, screen/street, text/sense, presence/absence—images move as they resist the isolating frame, loosening vision from sovereignty so that impaired looking may proceed through unusual alignments.

Unstill Image is in a conceptual romance with its companion program, Feral Vision. If Unstill Image traces how political violence and scopic regimes press visuality into fixed frames, Feral Vision turns to caged animals, strained comprehension, and unstable witnesses to trouble the limits of perception. Between them, the two programs plot a loose constellation of visions that never fully coincide with what settles on the screen.