The World Below

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Apr 15, 2023

Like the Temperance card’s place in the tarot deck, the four films presented in The World Below inhabit a space between death and devil, the afterlife and the unforeseen consequences of the living. Spells and seances make up the content of this program as a meditation on what might lay beyond the thin veil of…

Festival · Film Screening

Kalpana Subramanian, Magdalyn Asimakis, Mariano Ramis, Onyou Oh, Silvia Kolbowski

Program Details

Sunday, April 15, 2023
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Curated by Jaclyn Quaresma
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Work by Kalpana Subramanian, Onyou Oh, Mariano Ramis, Silvia Kolbowski
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As a part of this program, an online conversation with Magdalyn Asimakis and Silvia Kolbowski took place on April 17, 2023 at 12:00 PM.
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Images Festival, Toronto
Co-presented with Esse Magazine

In the Tarot, the Temperance card has long been associated with alchemy, liminality and purpose. Coming directly after Death and just before Devil, the card depicts an angel with no distinct gender, calm-faced yet determined as they pour a sacred liquid from one vessel to another. One foot on solid ground, the other dips into a flowing stream. Behind the angel is a path leading to a mountain that suggests they may have somewhere to go, or perhaps have just come from elsewhere. This self-assured card is one of transference and transmutation, of intuition, intention, deep knowing, and trust. It is the card of possibility, of both/and…

Like the Temperance card’s place in the tarot deck, the four films presented in The World Below inhabit a space between death and devil, the afterlife and the unforeseen consequences of the living. Spells and seances make up the content of this program as a meditation on what might lay beyond the thin veil of reality, whatever that means, and who might want to reach it.

Program Schedule

Whispers in the Water, Onyou Oh. TORONTO PREMIERE | SOUTH KOREA/USA | 2020 | 16MM>DIGITAL | 9 MIN | ENGLISH WITH SUBTITLES.

A woman who communicates with dead people explores different dimensions of language through her memories involving whispers and water. She learns, unlearns, and relearns how to speak. At the end of her journey, she encounters an existence whose voice resembles hers and sees how a language emerges from her breath.

Broadcasting from home, Mariano Ramis. CANADIAN PREMIERE | ARGENTINA/CANADA | 2022 | DIGITAL | 3 MIN | ENGLISH WITH SUBTITLES.

Broadcasting from home was created while working through the perplexity of loss and the human desire to communicate with the afterlife. The video was manufactured using a frame-by-frame analogue transfer technique and digital post-production.

Who will save us? Silvia Kolbowski. CANADIAN PREMIERE | USA | 2022 | DIGITAL | 14 MIN | ENGLISH WITH SUBTITLES

Who will save us? looks at the intersection between contemporary neoliberalism and the group psyche through a mashup/rewriting of two prescient films: Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) and George Lucas’ THX1138 (1971).