Wavelengths 4: Indefinite

Flush with shifting, indefinite and highly suggestive interpretations, this programme presents works that investigate and slyly circumvent prescriptive formulas of cinematic image-making.

In the tactile and evocative Flowers of the Sky (a medieval term for "comets"), Janie Geiser elegantly submits two thrifted panoramic photographs depicting a gathering of members of a Masonic order to superimpositions and masking techniques, in order to trouble and recast histories of the early 20th century. Through isolating parts of the photographs, the figures multiply, vibrate, and rise as if seeking to escape their emulsive existence, suggesting a rapture that extends beyond their printed world.

Explicitly discussing its own production and censorship at the hands of Turkish officials, contemporary artist and activist belit sag's Ayhan and me is an incisive, Farocki-like examination of the power of images, the roles and responsibilities of representation and sanctioned history-making, and the charged relationship between art and state control.

Fluctuating between figuration and abstraction, Manuela de Laborde's cosmic and contemplative AS WITHOUT SO WITHIN revels in the potential to reinvent the familiar as something wholly new. Conceptually informed by the artist's active filmgoing, AS WITHOUT SO WITHIN takes as its point of departure prop sculptures that are transformed both through hybrid techniques of framing, lighting, and superimposition and by being projected in an enclosed, silent architectural space. With various and alternating noise levels, the film's grainy images imply a multiplicity of worlds both within and beyond the present moment.

In Indefinite Pitch, James N. Kienitz Wilkins' hard-boiled voice-over weaves a complex and murky web of references, memories, fantasies, and histories best forgotten or purposely ignored with the slippery sensibility of a French nouveau roman, updated and infused with contemporary

American anxieties. Framed as a pathetic movie pitch set in Berlin, Indefinite Pitch points toward unconscious and elusive influences in life and in cinema mimicked by the rising and falling sonic frequency that, like an alarm, has an extremely indefinite pitch.

ANDRÉA PICARD

For artist bios, please visit tiff.net/wavelengths.

This programme is rated G.