Katja Verheul's Red Dust (2025, 17’) is a haunting visualisation of sand dust from the Sahara that, while passing through France, turns the sky red. This dust is a time capsule containing cesium-137 from the French nuclear tests in Algeria. Researching this natural phenomenon, Verheul exposes what lasts of a war that was never fought.

I Wan’na Be Like You by Broersen & Lukács (2024, 13’) lures the viewer deep into a dilapidated glasshouse, a place where nature is traditionally tamed and studied, by a ghostly figure, dancing to a variation on the popular song from Disney’s The Jungle Book (1967). As the music fades out, he makes way for the vocal group Black Harmony, offering a reinterpretation of the song in their own language. I Wan’na Be Like You deconstructs and reconstructs the novel, film, that song and their legacies.

Wink van Kempen’s You Are So Beautiful (1975, 4') will be screened as part of the DINAMO Screening: Disembodiment. It’s a deceivingly simple clash of image and music: You are so beautiful counterposes the Joe Cocker song of the same name with a much less accessible visual. The beautiful woman in question is immediately blocked from view by a man’s hand, which slowly approaches the camera until it blocks the entire field of view. Quite literally obscurantist, it’s a playful provocation and a sharp, ironic audio-visual quip.

Meanwhile, Geo Barcan's Surge of Transference (2024, 15'), which was shown during one of our Bring Your Own File showcases, investigates the expansion of the internet in a small Romanian town, where communities have formed and shifted around the newly imported Western technology. Within this micro-universe, the video traces the rapid transformation of the Internet, from the early days of peer-to-peer software to the upload of online late capitalism. 

Header: Katja Verheul's Red Dust (2025, 17’), in collection: LI-MA