The Machine that Kills Bad People

A bi-monthly film club at ICA, London, organized together with Maria Palacios Cruz, Beatrice Gibson, and Ben Rivers.

The Machine That Kills Bad People is, of course, the cinema—a medium that is so often and so visibly in service of a crushing status quo but which, in the right hands, is a fatal instrument of beauty, contestation, wonder, politics, poetry, new visions, testimonies, histories, dreams... It is also a film club devoted to showing work—“mainstream” and experimental, known and unknown, historical and contemporary—that takes up this task.

Screenings:

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No Master Territories: Feminist Worldmaking and the Moving Image

Curated with Silja Espolin Johnston and Clemens Ottenhausen

Kunstnernes Hus, Oslo, 13 February–3 May 2026

Bridging the fields of documentary and experimental film and video, No Master Territories offers an expansive, intersectional account of underappreciated encounters between feminism and the moving image. Across a polycentric, global geography, it maps how artists and filmmakers have explored the nexus of gender and power and charts sites at which feminism connects to other struggles for justice. By revisiting the period of the 1970s to 1990s, it aims both to pay homage to the important work that has come before and to respond to the urgencies of the present.

Contributions by:

One Way or Another

Co-curated with Shai Heredia

Kochi Biennale, 5–10 January 2026

One Way or Another brings together works of feminist nonfiction from diverse contexts that experiment with form to articulate aesthetic and political commitments. The programme takes its name from the English-language title of Sara Gómez’s docufiction De cierta maniera (1977), in homage to the Afro-Cuban filmmaker who passed away in 1974 at the age of only 31, leaving her first and only feature-length film to be posthumously released. At the same time, the phrase “one way or another” – with its invocation of perseverance and its embrace of plurality – provides a way of describing the attitude of the filmmakers included in the programme and the eclectic character of their work. These are films that were made against the odds, in contestation of dominant norms, and which conform to no single aesthetic style or political position. What unites them is the desire to use the moving image, one way or another, to articulate dissent and produce alternative representations of oneself and one’s world.

Films by:

The Secret Mirror, or, The Disappearance of A.A.A. Offresi 1981

Contribution to “On the Origins of the 21st Century or The Fall of Communism as Seen in Gay Pornography,” organised by Milan Ther

Kunstverein in Hamburg, 13 September 2025 – 11 January 2026

A.A.A. Offresi (1981) was made collectively by Maria Grazia Belmonti, Anna Carini, Rony Daopulo, Paola De Martiis, Annabella Miscuglio, and Loredana Rotondo. Produced for Italian public television station RAI2 and considered lost today, it used a hidden camera to observe the interactions of French sex worker Véronique and her clients in a Roman apartment.

Even before its scheduled broadcast, journalists deemed A.A.A. Offresi to be scandalous. Politicians who had never seen the film intervened, suspending the program and igniting what became known as the “Véronique affair”: a debate that divided the country. Within a week, criminal charges for the invasion of privacy and the facilitation of prostitution were brought against the filmmakers and RAI executives. Although all were ultimately acquitted, the film was seized as evidence by the court and was never seen publicly again.

The case surrounding A.A.A. Offresi sparked intense public discussion about censorship, privacy, morality, and feminism. For some, the problem was not obscenity, but that the filmmakers had captured men’s images without their awareness or permission; others insisted it was an important work of feminist filmmaking nevertheless. Balsom’s exhibition reconstructs the history of A.A.A. Offresi through a presentation of materials that constellate around its absence. This includes literature and ephemera that illuminate the development of an experimental video work that raises confrontational questions regarding sex, power, and privacy at a time when Italian television was beginning its rapid transformation into a privately-owned, market-driven enterprise.

Stanley Schtinter’s Liberated Film Club

Close-Up Cinema, London, 24 July 2025

No titles at the Liberated Film Club are announced in advance, and the films on show are unlikely to be seen anywhere else – in the case of Balsom’s selection, it is impossible for the film to be seen anywhere else.

Screening programme for Unconditional Space

Co-curated with Francesca Bertolotti-Bailey

Wonderfruit Festival, Thailand, 12–16 December 2024

Cinema emerged not long after global time zones were created to serve burgeoning networks of communication and transportation, at a moment when sales of watches were booming as people faced a new imperative to be punctual. Today, it is through the screen that we are compelled to be “always on,” pushed into accelerated rhythms of consumption and productivity. Most films present an idea of time that mirrors these developments, making time productive and meaningful. They do not waste or squander; they do not dream or drift or tarry. This programme explores the work of moving image artists who interrogate this paradigm and who imagine alternative relationships to temporality. It broaches notions of ancestral, cyclical, ritual, and planetary time, and embraces trance, repetition, duration, and memory.

Films by:

One Way or Another

Co-curated with Shai Heredia

Experimenta India, Bangalore, 4–8 December 2024

One Way or Another brings together works of feminist nonfiction from diverse contexts that experiment with form to articulate aesthetic and political commitments. The programme takes its name from the English-language title of Sara Gómez’s docufiction De cierta maniera (1977), in homage to the Afro-Cuban filmmaker who passed away in 1974 at the age of only 31, leaving her first and only feature-length film to be posthumously released. At the same time, the phrase “one way or another” – with its invocation of perseverance and its embrace of plurality – provides a way of describing the attitude of the filmmakers included in the programme and the eclectic character of their work. These are films that were made against the odds, in contestation of dominant norms, and which conform to no single aesthetic style or political position. What unites them is the desire to use the moving image, one way or another, to articulate dissent and produce alternative representations of oneself and one’s world.

Films by:

Stan Brakhage

Locarno Film Festival, 13 August 2024

An introductory selection of eight films that demonstrate the breadth of Brakhage's practice while gesturing to some of the collaborations and relationships of importance to his life and work.

No Master Territories: Feminist Worldmaking and the Moving Image

Co-curated with Hila Peleg

MAXXI Museum, Rome, 21 November – 10 December 2023

A selection of films from “No Master Territories: Feminist Worldmaking and the Moving Image” (HKW Berlin, 2022) by:

Cut the Line

Beursschouwberg, Brussels, 25–28 October 2023

A selection of films opening up a conversation about feminism, historiography and nonlinear temporalities of remembrance.

“The pattern is defined. Cut the line and chronology falls in a crumpled heap. I prefer a crumpled heap, history at my feet, not stretched above my head.” — Lis Rhodes

Films by:

An Oceanic Feeling

Monokino, Oostende, 27 October 2023

Gunvor Nelson’s Moon’s Pool (1973) and Sharon Lockhart’s Eventide (2022)

A Swedish woman in America, an American woman in Sweden. Two very different films made nearly fifty years apart, both exploring the choreography of bodies in relation to water and the night sky.

Gunvor Nelson’s Moon’s Pool is a kaleidoscopic film that evokes psychic and corporeal unboundedness through the submersion of the filmmaker’s own body in water. Nelson dissolves the clarity of the image into deep blue undulations that glimmer and flow with intimate intensity. Plunging into a fluid and expansive realm, Moon’s Pool draws out affinities between sexuality, the aquatic, and the cosmic.

Sharon Lockhart’s Eventide is a single 30-minute take of the Gotland seashore at dusk. As the light fades into inky darkness, the camera remains still, its gaze unwavering as a woman enters the scene, flashlight in hand. In time, she is joined by five others. What are they searching for? Meteors shoot through the sky above them. Lockhart’s deceptively simple film is a plea for careful looking, a reckoning with what cannot be seen, and an act of grieving – all caught between the ordinary and the miraculous.

No Master Territories: Feminist Worldmaking and the Moving Image

Co-curated with Hila Peleg

Open City Documentary Festival, London, 6 – 12 September 2023

A selection of films from “No Master Territories: Feminist Worldmaking and the Moving Image” (HKW Berlin, 2022) by:

Bez Mistrza, Bez Pana: Ruchomy Obraz i Feministyczne Tworzenie Światów (No Master Territories: Feminist Worldmaking and the Moving Image)

Co-curated with Hila Peleg

Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw, 12 May - 16 July 2023

Millennium Docs Against Gravity Film Festival, Warsaw, 12 - 21 May 2023

Contributions by:

No Master Territories: Feminist Worldmaking and the Moving Image

Co-curated with Hila Peleg

TIFF Bell Lightbox, Toronto, 3 – 26 March 2023

A selection of films from “No Master Territories: Feminist Worldmaking and the Moving Image” (HKW Berlin, 2022) by:

La lotta non è finita: Italian Feminism and 1970s Experimental Film

Co-curated with Hila Peleg, organised in conjunction with Nuova Orfeo and Goethe-Institüt Palermo

Cinema Rouge et Noir, Palermo, 3 February 2023

No Master Territories: Feminist Worldmaking and the Moving Image

Co-curated with Hila Peleg

Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, 19 June – 28 August 2022

At a time when feminism is enjoying a mainstream resurgence but must be reclaimed from a neoliberal emphasis on individual success, and when the hybridization of documentary and artists’ film occupies a vital place in the landscape of contemporary practices, the exhibition No Master Territories makes a strategic return to the past. By revisiting the period of the 1970s to 1990s, it aims both to pay homage to the important work that has come before and to respond to the urgencies of the present.

Bridging the fields of documentary and artists’ film, No Master Territories assembles a plurality of practices to offer an expansive, intersectional account of underappreciated encounters between feminism and the moving image. Across a polycentric, global geography, it maps how artists and filmmakers have explored the nexus of gender and power and charts sites at which feminism connects to other struggles for justice.

Contributions by:

More information here

Fluid Labours

Rieveld Academie Studium Generale conference, Oceanic Imaginaries; 25 March, 2022

In his 1957 book Mythologies, Roland Barthes casts the ocean as a blank space, a traceless void that paralyses the production of meaning: ‘In a single day, how many really nonsignifying fields do we cross? Very few, sometimes none. Here I am, before the sea; it is true that it bears no message. But on the beach, what material for semiology! Flags, slogans, signals, signboards, clothes, suntan even, which are so many messages to me.’ The ocean’s salty expanse will never quench the semiotician’s thirst for signs. The films of Fluid Labours confront the ocean’s difficult relation to signification yet challenge this perspective, conceiving of the sea not as an empty space but as an inhabited realm that is a site of work, contingency and relationality, as well as a place of fraught encounter between the human and other-than-human. Beginning in 1895, at the birth of cinema, and extending into the present, this selection explores how nonfiction filmmakers have mobilised diverse strategies to represent the myriad forms of labour that take place on the water. They call for a reprisal and revision of Barthes: here I am, before the sea, and it is true that it bears many messages – messages of fantasy and necessity, exploit and exploitation, tradition and modernity, life and death.

Films by:

More information here

Peggy Ahwesh: Vision Machines

Co-curated with Robert Leckie

Spike Island, Bristol; 25 September 2021 – 16 January 2022

Kunsthall Stavanger; 24 February – 29 May, 2022

Vision Machines is the first survey exhibition in the UK by American artist Peggy Ahwesh (b. 1954, Pennsylvania, USA) and includes single-channel films and video installations made between 1993 and 2021.

Since the early 1980s, Peggy Ahwesh has forged a distinctive moving image practice in the ruins of originality and authority. Whether by working with nonprofessional performers, especially children, or by repurposing existing images — such as a decaying pornographic film, the video game Tomb Raider, or computer-animated news coverage — Ahwesh embraces improvisatory strategies that probe the critical potential of play. With keen attentiveness to the materiality of bodies and media technologies alike, her works articulate a feminist commitment to the marginal and the minor.

Even as Ahwesh rejects the notion of style as authorial signature, her concerns with sexuality, subjectivity, and troubling the boundary between the animate and inanimate have remained constant across the decades. Focusing on a selection of works that explore the relationship between the body and the technologized image, the exhibition at Spike Island spans issues and ideas as diverse as gender, climate change and war.

Shoreline Movements

Co-curated with Grégory Castéra (Council) for the Taipei Biennial, “You and I Don’t Live on the Same Planet,” curated by Martin Guinard and Bruno Latour, 21 November 2020 – 14 March 2021

Shoreline Movements is a film program that approaches the threshold between land and water as a material environment and as a provocative metaphor for the uncertainties and conflicts of worldly existence. Across eighteen works of cinematic non-fiction made between 1944 and 2020, Shoreline Movements explores how artists and filmmakers have addressed the manifold encounters that take place in the littoral zone, broaching issues of environmental crisis, indigeneity, coloniality, community, and otherness. Presented within a space designed by Daniel Steegmann Mangrané, across six cycles that come and go like the tides, these films search for ways to render sensible the particularity and complexity of reality, embracing filmic and verbal language as nontransparent mediators that aid in this task.

Films and videos by:

More information here

An Oceanic Feeling

Punto de Vista – Festival Internacional de Cine Documental de Navarra, Pamplona, Spain; 2–7 March, 2020

An Oceanic Feeling challenges the Romantic myth of the ocean as a dark, monstrous void of unknowable depths, populated by alien creatures. Through a series of six screenings of documentary and artists' films from around the world, An Oceanic Feeling explores how the seas are thoroughly imbricated in human histories of colonialism, slavery, exploration and labour, asking: what if we understood the ocean not as dividing us but as connecting us? What politics, what ethics, would follow?

Including films by:

More information here

Prophecies for the Second Machine Age

Online exhibition for Kadist Art Foundation in collaboration with VIDEOCLOOP

11 March to 11 April 2019

The five works of ‘Prophecies for the Second Machine Age’ offer imaginative responses to the problem of confronting the nonevent of prolonged injury as it occurs at the intersection of the natural and the artificial. In an era of automation and ‘smart’ machines, when rationalization triumphs and technology causes as many problems as it solves, what futures await vulnerable bodies and environments? What catastrophic pasts have they already endured? These artists turn to poetic condensation and oblique metaphor to approach these questions, cultivating mood rather than communicating information.

Including films by:

Watch the programme here

Truth or Consequences

CIRCUIT Artist Film and Video Aotearoa New Zealand 2018 Commissions

For the five artists that comprise this programme, the referential principle of the moving image is an affordance that spurs poetic inquiries into history, identity, and relations to the land. The image’s ability to capture physical reality is not trusted outright as a guarantee of knowledge or singular truth, but approached as a starting point for processes of reflection, questioning, and attunement that make a claim on the real. These works leave behind postmodern scepticism, asserting a bond to actuality even if the meaning of what is seen and heard remains open to debate. The artists embrace diverse techniques—found footage, interviews, observation, testimony—but in all cases documentary emerges as an inquiry into not simply what we know, but how we know it, as experiments with form dynamically reflect on how to rehabilitate a relationship to reality at a time when it seems everywhere in peril.

Including newly commissioned films by:

An Oceanic Feeling

Govett-Brewster Art Gallery/Len Lye Centre, New Plymouth, New Zealand; 4 August – 18 November 2018

An Oceanic Feeling challenges the Romantic myth of the ocean as a dark, monstrous void of unknowable depths, populated by alien creatures. Through a series of six screenings of recent artists’ films from around the world, An Oceanic Feeling explores how the seas are thoroughly imbricated in human histories of colonialism, slavery, exploration and labour, asking: what if we understood the ocean not as dividing us but as connecting us? What politics, what ethics, would follow?

Including films by:

Read the programme notes here; accompanied by the publication An Oceanic Feeling: Cinema and the Sea.

Bette Gordon

Birkbeck Institute of the Moving Image, London; 17–18 February 2017

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, New York-based filmmaker Bette Gordon produced a series of works that chart a major shift in experimental practice from the rigor of structural film to a theoretically-informed interest in fragmented narrative and subjective experience that Noel Carroll would dub the “new talkies.” With her best-known work, 1983's Variety, Gordon moves fully into the idiom of independent narrative cinema, but her concerns remain consistent: questions of sexuality, labour, and gentrification are pursued within a critical interrogation of filmic language. Hers is a cinema at once politically urgent, formally sophisticated, and emotionally compelling.

Read the programme notes here and here