In a cinema room, its doors open, the viewer can come and go as they please: can choose to enter or to exit, to sit or to stand, to lie-down or to walk away. Projected on the screen, in a continuous loop, is a selection of six works by the Pakistani artist Basir Mahmood, created through his nearly decade-long practice. This is a Cinema Space for Air to Enter and Circulate, that is, an airy space, open to any and all conversations with ‘‘the other’’. 

Over the last ten years, a number of recurrences and obsessions have informed and defined Mahmood’s work, which become evident here in this 70-minute loop. The first of these is the way in which the camera’s intervention alters the ‘‘real’’, imposing a sense of staging and a feeling of discomfort to the gestures. Then there is the artist's interest in the banality of everyday actions (peeling a piece of fruit, putting on a suit, walking backwards and forwards, sitting on a chair), and which their constant repetition raises to an almost iconographic dimension. But Basir also works on the political subtext, whether in the cultural clash between East and West, the role of farce in electoral dramaturgy or the dominant role of masculinity and the gender violence associated with it. Finally, another singular trope in the Pakistani artist's work is his relationship with the history of his country's own cinema, and the ruins of Lollywood (Pakistan's Hollywood, which in the 1970s was the fourth largest film industry in the world, and today is reduced to television by-products). 

This is a filmography dedicated to exploring the limits of perception of reality by a film camera. Notions of posing for the camera and (self-)representation are present, as is the discomfort and apathy before an outside gaze and how the rendering of gesture can crystallise this. But always through a semi-opaque lens that obfuscates more than it reveals, and produces mysterious images and situations, whose secret is only revealed in an overall image, that is, in the coherence and unity of Basir Mahmood's oeuvre. 

The artist was awarded the Paulo Cunha e Silva prize in 2020.

The full line-up of films can be seen here. Access to this screening is free.