Against ‘the History’, with a capital H, this selection gathers shorts that can be interpreted as queer feminist interventions to conventional ways of History-making. This selection is an invitation to think collectively about the queer feminist historicity, non-linear, non-hegemonic her* stories and the (re-)creation of queer pasts and futures.

Films:

Something Said, Jay Bernard, UK, 2017, 8 min
Rüya, Sinan Göknur, Turkey, 2018, 2 min 30 seconds
Reality Fragment 160921, Qigemu, USA/Sweden, 2017, 13 min
LYING WOMEN, Deborah Kelly, Australia, 2016, 3 min
Reclaiming Intersex, Gabrielle Le Roux & Nthabiseng Mokoena, South Africa, 2016, 28 min
These are My Hands, Evi Tsiligaridou, UK, 2018, 8 min
Archive of Feelings: Radical Compassion, Gizem Aksu, Turkey, 2018, 10 min

Haunted by that history, and in the context of the recent rise of the far-right and the tragedy of Grenfell, Something Said is an imaginative, gestural letter to Yvonne Ruddock, the 16 year-old whose birthday was being celebrated the night of the fire. Rüya is a queer dream emerging from the real ‘surreal’ scapes of Istanbul that hold in tandem so much suffering yet so much pleasure. Reality Fragment 160921 follows two people in their process of reality-curation, revealing the careful cultivation of our own histories. LYING WOMEN, imagines art history’s most famous reclining nudes daring to escape from centuries of servitude to colonial heteropatriarchy. In Reclaiming Intersex, “I was born into a world that said: you do not exist, you should not exist, you cannot exist” says Nthabiseng Mokoena, an intersex in South Africa in 1978. These Are My Hands is a personal narrative of a trans body where pain, resistance, power and love become intertwined and merge into one, a visual poem written and voiced by playwright Jo Clifford. Whereas the world tends to reiterate its hot borders, conflictual discourses and neoliberal violence, Archive of Feelings: Radical Compassion reminds us it may be the time to remember there are worlds without ends.

The screening is followed by a collective discussion on queer feminist her*stories with an interactive play moderated by Zeynep Dişbudak, Esma Akyel and Esra Özban.