Molly Palmer seeks to document the world as it’s felt from inner life, rather than portraying it through the reality structures embedded in/by society. Her newest film, ‘Amulet’, commissioned by The Couch, is drawn towards subject positions that are routinely othered, isolated and disenfranchised within the order of daily life. Working together with a group of close collaborators, she creates a space of curiosity towards perceptual shifts they have experienced through grief, trauma, anxiety, depression or diagnosed difference.
The screening of Amulet will be followed by a conversation between Molly Palmer and writer and curator Jamie Sutcliffe, moderated by curator Maia Kenney. They will dive into key texts that went into the making of the film: books on the relations between perception, medicine and magic; magic’s potential to forge points of resistance and change within a dominant structuring of the world; and magic as a technology of selfhood. The starting point for the talk will be a phrase from the film: “Each time the key is pressed, the disc turns and the code changes.”
Maia Kenney is an independent curator, educator and critic specialised in feminist underpinnings of modernist art movements (and a proponent of the destruction of Modernism as a Eurocentric storytelling device). She is the curator and editor of The Couch and teaches theory in the Master of Contextual Design at Design Academy Eindhoven.
Molly Palmer works between film, installation, sculpture, choreography and music to explore the strangeness within ordinary things and the technologies of belief that transform our experience of them. Her research and long term collaborations value shifts of perception that alter our relation to reality, and examine the psychedelic dimensions of experiences such as grief, complex trauma and diagnosed difference.
Jamie Sutcliffe is a writer, curator, lecturer, and co-director of Strange Attractor Press. His work explores artistic encounters with science fictive fabulation, the politics of gaming, animation and its multiple entanglements with developments in the life sciences, haunted media, and the persistence of myth, all understood as technologies of selfhood. His essays, interviews and reviews have been published widely, amongst others by Art Monthly, Art Review and e-flux Criticism. He is the editor of Documents of Contemporary Art: Magic, published by the Whitechapel Gallery and The MIT Press, and Weeb Theory, co-edited with Petra Szemán.
This programme is supported by Stichting Het HEM and Galerie AKINCI.