ITAB 2024
2024 marked the second year of Reaching Out; ITAB’s collaboration with their network partners in Future Futures. The year focused on the film medium’s potential for reversing gazes and recentering critical dialogues, and the members met with artists and filmmakers such as Amin Zouiten, Malin Hüber and Roxy Farhat, discussing how film can redirect our gazes and help us read the present.
From these meetings, the boards set out to create a talkshow covering these very topics. They worked with a professional film crew and scripted three episodes of what came to be The Future Futures Talk Show, shot in front of a live audience as the full network met up for a conference in Stockholm in November.
The Future Futures Talk Show looks at the moving image, using artistic methods to dismantle or challenge normative image culture. It considers contemporary and historical references, consulting the work of Palestinian filmmakers, climate activists and civil rights defenders to explore how video has been instrumental in protest movements and the fight for political change. The groups invited artists and curators to discuss with them how technological developments of the last decades have shifted the premises for how, and by whom, video is being recorded and distributed.
The Future Futures Talk Show has gone on to be screened at schools across the Nordics, at museums, teacher conferences, and at a culture political convention gathering Sweden’s top politicians. All episodes can be streamed using the links below.
The Index Teen Advisory Board meets with artist Roxy Farhat to talk about climate activism, capitalism and the male gaze. Together they discuss Roxy’s film Society of the Spectacle and how art and activism can interact. Representatives from the board share ideas on how museums and art galleries can reach a wider audience, where art films should be shown, and how they themselves use photography and film in exhibition spaces.
PRAKSIS Teen Advisory Board invites film producer Malin Hüber to talk about
representation both behind and in front of the camera; the challenges of the film industry and the importance of highlighting stories that are not given space in the mainstream media. The episode ties in with All Eyes On, an exhibition of photography and video works by Palestinian artists curated by PTAB for the Nitja Center for Contemporary Art.
PUBLICS Youth hosts artist Vanja Sandell Billström in an episode that addresses the role and politics of the moving image in documenting and understanding the present. The episode builds on the work of the board over the past year, including short films with artist Shubhangi Sing and a meeting with researcher Léo Custódio. The aim is to explore the politics of the moving image and to consider video and film as forms of communication and registration of the present.