Moving Image — Karen Cunningham

Selected film and moving image works & screenings.

Air’s Rock (1985)

Takahiko Iimura

Alluvium (2015)

Peggy Ahwesh

Development (2000-2015)

Karen Cunningham

Land as Language (2025)

Land as Language was a screening event I curated for The Filmmakers Coop, NYC in 2025: link

The title suggests that land; an area of ground, a region, an island, a field, a hill, a desert, a rock, can be comprehended as a form of communication, a site of knowledge, a place that can be ‘read’ and interpreted. The programme comprised work by myself alongside the influential American experimental filmmaker and video artist Peggy Ahwesh and the pioneering Japanese artist and filmmaker Takahiko Iimura.

The films in Land as Language share an interest in both human and non-human experiences of time and in bringing these films together - at this point in time - I hope to offer a dialogue on the often-troubled relationships between travel, photography, and place, evoking ways of thinking through processes of undoing, quoting, and delineating.

The works selected for this screening are, in different ways, concerned with how experiences and concepts of specific areas of land, and lands, are translated through film and moving image practices, especially the interplay between proximity and distance that film works can invoke.

Apparent Time (2024)

Apparent Time is an 11-minute film, with sound, formed from a handful of archival photographs, slides, and postcards, footage of the un-doing of a piece of woven fabric, and the erasure of a tattoo.

The film’s central subject is a photograph titled, 'Photo 9 - Boat on the spot where Elugelab once stood, now a crater, 1972’ taken in Enewetak Atoll in the Marshall Islands, 20 years after the nuclear device ‘Mike’ was detonated there, completely vaporising the island of Elugelab. The film’s audio and monologue focus attention on the seemingly fixed positions presented in the imagery in order to enable telescopic views of time, and events, to be rendered.

‘Apparent Time’ is also the act of measuring time by observing the shadows cast on a surface produced by the sun’s rays falling onto an object.

Mean Time (2020)

9-minute film, with sound, made during a residency with Collective Gallery, Edinburgh.

Movable Type; Under Erasure (2016)

13 minute film with sound. Made in collboration with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

Development (2000 - 2015)

Development is a SD video filmed in, and on the way to the tourist district of Kuta, Bali in 2000 and edited in 2015.

Two years after this footage was filmed the Sari nightclub was the site of a major bombing attack that killed over 200 people and is thought to have been carried out in retaliation to Western government’s 'war on terror' campaign. The video includes Balinese ritualistic dance dramas, Legong dancing (characterised by complex finger movements, footwork, and expressive facial expressions), and dances constructed specifically for tourist audiences. Consisting of hand-held shots, diegetic sound, and text by the artist segments of the video are filmed in 'night-vision'

Fib (2013)

Digital film with sound. 22 min 30 sec

Filmed in Fife, Scotland. Commissioned by LUX Moving Image & Collective, Edinburgh

Writing Culture (2013)

Video with sound. 1 min 49 sec.

A video work which considers the privilege afforded to the ‘word’ (written or spoken) over that of the image. The title contextualises the video regarding anthropology’s self-reflective critique of ethnographic texts as the primary means to record the results of fieldwork and the inherent problems of ‘writing’ an 'other’s ‘culture’. It also directly references the influential book 'Writing Culture: the Poetics and Politics of Ethnography' (1986) by James Clifford & George Marcus, which is primarily charged with signalling the so-called 'crisis of representation'.

Anthropology or the difference between footprints and footsteps (2010)

SD video with sound. 4 min 20 sec.

Filmed on location at Robert Smithson’s 'Broken Circle, Spiral Hill' in Emmen, The Netherlands and including selected scenes from Slava Tsukermans film ‘Liquid Sky' (1982).