Lawrence Lek, AIDOL, 2019 [Still]. © Lawrence Lek. Courtesy the artist and Sadie Coles HQ, London.
Meriem Bennani, Party on the CAPS, 2018 [Still]. Courtesy of the artist.
Ayoung Kim, Delivery Dancer’s Sphere, 2023 [Still]. Courtesy of the artist and Oyster Films.
Image copyright of the artists Michael Bell-Smith and Sara Magenheimer, Acetone Reality, 2025 [Still], Courtesy of Video Data Bank, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Speculative Choreographies: Screening Event co-curated by Sine Screen
Speculative Choreographies is a screening event co-curated with London-based ESEA screening organisation Sine Screen, held as part of Lawrence Lek’s exhibition Life Before Automation.
The event will present moving-image works where the screen becomes both a stage and a site of collapse – as labour, intimacy, and performance mutate through digital landscapes mired by the spectre of surveillance, technological mirages and dissimulations.
In AIDOL, Lawrence Lek conjures a world where the fantasy of human originality falters before the allure of machine divinity, as a once-revered Diva defies obsolescence by all means in a post-AI world. Party on the CAPS by Meriem Bennani imagines an alternate universe, a world in which US immigration teleports refugees to CAPS, a heavily surveilled island in the Atlantic. The work depicts the vibrant life that comes to pass in this remote land. In Delivery Dancer’s Sphere, Ayoung Kim maps the exhausting, algorithmic choreography of Seoul’s gig economy, abstracting couriers into avatars in a loop of motion, gamified labour and mediated desires.
Finally, we are excited to present the UK Premiere of Acetone Reality (2025) that exposes the latent absurdity within contested narratives of reality, by combining animation, found footage, the artists’ own voices crashing against computer-generated dialogue, to prod us to ruminate on how to access the real.
THIS EVENT WILL TAKE PLACE AT THE CINEMA LOCATED IN THE RICHARD HOGGART BUILDING ON GOLDSMITHS CAMPUS, NOT AT CCA.
– Reception: Main Entrance of Richard Hoggart Building, Goldsmiths University of London (MAP)
– Venue: Cinema, G/F Richard Hoggart Building (MAP)
– Doors open: 7pm
PROGRAMME:
Lawrence Lek, Chapter 8: Lyric Video (Extract from AIDOL), 2019. 12 min.
Meriem Bennani, Party on the CAPS, 2018. 25 min.
Ayoung Kim, Delivery Dancer’s Sphere, 2023. 25 min.
Sara Magenheimer, Michael Bell-Smith, Acetone Reality, 2025. 12 min.
BIOGRAPHIES:
Meriem Bennani’s (b. 1988, Rabat, Morocco) evolving practice encompasses sculpture, drawing, immersive film and amplified video installations informed by gender politics, censorship, the ubiquity of globalised technologies and a dystopian – or utopian – sense of existing between cultures and time. Her work is often rooted in the traditions and histories of her native Morocco and the wider African diaspora, gesturing postcolonial power dynamics. Engaging in an approach to digital animation she describes as ‘magic’ or a ‘hyperactivity of genre’, Bennani resists singularity by blending elements of documentary film, music and iPhone videos, reality television, cartoons and science fiction with humour and tender storytelling. Often created in collaboration with her family, Bennani’s films adopt a vernacular style; dramatic narratives are mediated through playful sound dynamics and a combination of digital tools, from collaged found footage to CGI animal proxies. Bennani’s world-building methods produce an idiosyncratic visual language that encourages nonlinear viewing and reflects the fragmented nature and internet-pace of contemporary living.
Ayoung Kim (South Korea) is a visual artist as well as a filmmaker. Kim adopts the devices of speculative storytelling to evoke unfamiliar forms of reading, listening and thinking about the conditions of the world by focusing on unlikely encounters of ideas. Her projects take the forms of video, sonic fiction, VR, text, performance and game simulation and are presented as exhibitions, performances and publications. Kim exhibited and screened at Venice Biennale (2015); Palais de Tokyo (2016); Korea Artist Prize (2019); Sharjah Film Platform (2019, 2020); Berlinale (2020); Asian Art Biennial (2021); Videobrasil (2021) and Sharjah Biennial (2023).
Sara Magenheimer( b.1981, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) is an artist with a background in music whose work spans filmmaking, video installation, writing, and sculpture. She is based in New York. Recent solo exhibitions include the New Museum, NY; Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (PICA), OR; The Kitchen, NY. Her videos have been widely screened including the Flaherty Seminar, Oberhausen Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Brooklyn Academy of Music, the New York Film Festival, Images Festival, Anthology Film Archives, EMPAC at RPI, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. She was the recipient of a 2014 Rema Hort Mann Foundation Grant, 2015 Artadia Award, the Prix De Varti at the 2015 Ann Arbor Film Festival, a grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts in 2020 and awarded a Rauschenberg Residency on Captiva in 2021. Magenheimer authored Notes on Art and Resistance A–Z leading up to and following the 2016 U.S. presidential election. In 2019 Wendy’s Subway published Beige Pursuit, Magenheimer’s first book length work of writing, which is now in its second edition.
Michael Bell-Smith (b.1978, East Corinth, Maine, US) is an artist based in New York. His work has been exhibited and screened in museums and galleries internationally, including; Greater New York (2016), MoMA PS1; The 2008 Liverpool Biennial, UK; The 5th Seoul International Media Biennale; SFMOMA, San Francisco; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, ES; The New Museum, New York; Hirshhorn Museum, DC; Musee d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris; MoMA, New York; and Tate Liverpool, UK. He holds a BA in Art / Semiotics from Brown University and an MFA from Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College.
Sine Screen is a London-based screening collective dedicated to showcasing independent cinema and moving-image works from across East and Southeast Asia. It aims to create space for critical dialogue around dominant representations of ESEA cultures and histories through diverse programming, and has received support from the British Film Institute and Arts Council England.
Hester Yang is an artist-researcher based between London and Beijing, and the co-founder of Sine Screen.
Cici Peng is a film writer and curator based in London, and a programmer for Sine Screen. Her writing can be found in Filmmaker Magazine, the Financial Times, Film Comment, frieze among other publications. She works for New York Film Festival’s Currents shorts.
Speculative Choreographies is a screening event co-curated with London-based ESEA screening organisation Sine Screen, held as part of Lawrence Lek’s exhibition Life Before Automation.
The event will present moving-image works where the screen becomes both a stage and a site of collapse – as labour, intimacy, and performance mutate through digital landscapes mired by the spectre of surveillance, technological mirages and dissimulations.
In AIDOL, Lawrence Lek conjures a world where the fantasy of human originality falters before the allure of machine divinity, as a once-revered Diva defies obsolescence by all means in a post-AI world. Party on the CAPS by Meriem Bennani imagines an alternate universe, a world in which US immigration teleports refugees to CAPS, a heavily surveilled island in the Atlantic. The work depicts the vibrant life that comes to pass in this remote land. In Delivery Dancer’s Sphere, Ayoung Kim maps the exhausting, algorithmic choreography of Seoul’s gig economy, abstracting couriers into avatars in a loop of motion, gamified labour and mediated desires.
Finally, we are excited to present the UK Premiere of Acetone Reality (2025) that exposes the latent absurdity within contested narratives of reality, by combining animation, found footage, the artists’ own voices crashing against computer-generated dialogue, to prod us to ruminate on how to access the real.
THIS EVENT WILL TAKE PLACE AT THE CINEMA LOCATED IN THE RICHARD HOGGART BUILDING ON GOLDSMITHS CAMPUS, NOT AT CCA.
– Reception: Main Entrance of Richard Hoggart Building, Goldsmiths University of London (MAP)
– Venue: Cinema, G/F Richard Hoggart Building (MAP)
– Doors open: 7pm
PROGRAMME:
Lawrence Lek, Chapter 8: Lyric Video (Extract from AIDOL), 2019. 12 min.
Meriem Bennani, Party on the CAPS, 2018. 25 min.
Ayoung Kim, Delivery Dancer’s Sphere, 2023. 25 min.
Sara Magenheimer, Michael Bell-Smith, Acetone Reality, 2025. 12 min.
BIOGRAPHIES:
Meriem Bennani’s (b. 1988, Rabat, Morocco) evolving practice encompasses sculpture, drawing, immersive film and amplified video installations informed by gender politics, censorship, the ubiquity of globalised technologies and a dystopian – or utopian – sense of existing between cultures and time. Her work is often rooted in the traditions and histories of her native Morocco and the wider African diaspora, gesturing postcolonial power dynamics. Engaging in an approach to digital animation she describes as ‘magic’ or a ‘hyperactivity of genre’, Bennani resists singularity by blending elements of documentary film, music and iPhone videos, reality television, cartoons and science fiction with humour and tender storytelling. Often created in collaboration with her family, Bennani’s films adopt a vernacular style; dramatic narratives are mediated through playful sound dynamics and a combination of digital tools, from collaged found footage to CGI animal proxies. Bennani’s world-building methods produce an idiosyncratic visual language that encourages nonlinear viewing and reflects the fragmented nature and internet-pace of contemporary living.
Ayoung Kim (South Korea) is a visual artist as well as a filmmaker. Kim adopts the devices of speculative storytelling to evoke unfamiliar forms of reading, listening and thinking about the conditions of the world by focusing on unlikely encounters of ideas. Her projects take the forms of video, sonic fiction, VR, text, performance and game simulation and are presented as exhibitions, performances and publications. Kim exhibited and screened at Venice Biennale (2015); Palais de Tokyo (2016); Korea Artist Prize (2019); Sharjah Film Platform (2019, 2020); Berlinale (2020); Asian Art Biennial (2021); Videobrasil (2021) and Sharjah Biennial (2023).
Sara Magenheimer( b.1981, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) is an artist with a background in music whose work spans filmmaking, video installation, writing, and sculpture. She is based in New York. Recent solo exhibitions include the New Museum, NY; Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (PICA), OR; The Kitchen, NY. Her videos have been widely screened including the Flaherty Seminar, Oberhausen Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Brooklyn Academy of Music, the New York Film Festival, Images Festival, Anthology Film Archives, EMPAC at RPI, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. She was the recipient of a 2014 Rema Hort Mann Foundation Grant, 2015 Artadia Award, the Prix De Varti at the 2015 Ann Arbor Film Festival, a grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts in 2020 and awarded a Rauschenberg Residency on Captiva in 2021. Magenheimer authored Notes on Art and Resistance A–Z leading up to and following the 2016 U.S. presidential election. In 2019 Wendy’s Subway published Beige Pursuit, Magenheimer’s first book length work of writing, which is now in its second edition.
Michael Bell-Smith (b.1978, East Corinth, Maine, US) is an artist based in New York. His work has been exhibited and screened in museums and galleries internationally, including; Greater New York (2016), MoMA PS1; The 2008 Liverpool Biennial, UK; The 5th Seoul International Media Biennale; SFMOMA, San Francisco; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, ES; The New Museum, New York; Hirshhorn Museum, DC; Musee d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris; MoMA, New York; and Tate Liverpool, UK. He holds a BA in Art / Semiotics from Brown University and an MFA from Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College.
Sine Screen is a London-based screening collective dedicated to showcasing independent cinema and moving-image works from across East and Southeast Asia. It aims to create space for critical dialogue around dominant representations of ESEA cultures and histories through diverse programming, and has received support from the British Film Institute and Arts Council England.
Hester Yang is an artist-researcher based between London and Beijing, and the co-founder of Sine Screen.
Cici Peng is a film writer and curator based in London, and a programmer for Sine Screen. Her writing can be found in Filmmaker Magazine, the Financial Times, Film Comment, frieze among other publications. She works for New York Film Festival’s Currents shorts.
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