Antonia Luxem
Antonia Luxem creates experimental films exploring different realities and bodies, seeking to transport viewers to new mental spaces.
Antonia Luxem is an artist filmmaker whose work is underpinned by an interest in neurology, philosophy and human perception. Recently her subject matters have expanded to tackling questions of queer identity, informed by her experience of being a lesbian and in an effort to challenge the system which has made that experience what it is. She is an alumni of Open School East (2018) and the FLAMIN Fellowship (2019/2020). She is in residency at Gasworks in 2021.
Recent screenings and exhibitions include Fragment Gallery, Moscow; B3 Biennal of the moving image, Frankfurt; Swiss Church, London; Well Projects, Margate; Turf Projects, Croydon; Whitstable Bienniale; New York Indie Film Festival, New York; Underwire Film Festival, London; Traverse Video, Toulouse.
Dearest Degenerate
HD Video / 09:51 min / 2019
This piece is an address, in the form of a letter, to the close and homophobic person. It is a deconstructed reaction to the underlying, violent, invisible and yet prevalent homophobia within our society. It was developed from material found in personal notebooks and diaries and inspired by books such as Didier Eribon’s “Insult and the Making of the Gay Self” and José Esteban Muñoz’s “Cruising Utopia”.
Ode au Temps
HD Video / 06:09 min / 2018
Ode au Temps takes time as its starting point to explore the anxiety felt by the individual faced to the universe. It is a disorientated ode to the passing of life through the eye of time – comprehensible only in relation to an unknown end point, death.
Cosmos Echo
HD Video / 06:19 min / 2017
“Eyes closed and lying on the ground, I listened repeatedly to the sounds captured in space. The experience was striking: these sounds were so unlike what we humans are used to hearing in our daily lives that it proved difficult at first for the mind to interpret them in visual terms. After a while, however, interesting visual representations started to appear, familiar at first but gradually becoming more abstract.”
Cosmos Echo is a stream of consciousness depiction of a duality between Earth-centric and aleatoric abstract imagery. It takes the stance which considers human perception as a combination of bottom-up and top-down mental processes: the brain, devoid of any knowledge about sounds from space, can only seek to interpret these using past knowledge, and it is only with repetition that new imagery is created, slowly replacing – or transforming – the familiar into the imaginary.