Catalogue > At random

On A Clear Day You Can See the Revolution From Here excavates layers of myth, geology and technology to reveal the shifting fault lines between a government, its people and their land. The film brings into focus contemporary processes of nation building and myth-making in Kazakhstan through an expansive journey across the remnants of Soviet technological infrastructures that haunt the landscape. Shot on 16mm, the camera is drawn across the Kazakh Steppe taking in locations that include mineral mines, the Eurasian Steppe, the STS decommissioned nuclear site and the newly constructed city of Nur-Sultan.

Emma Charles is a London based artist and filmmaker. Working with experimental approaches to moving image and sound, her research based practice navigates the field of non-fiction while engaging with recurring themes of technology, capitalism and landscape. Playing with the blurred lines between documentary and fiction, her work often reveals the artificiality of both the filmic environment and our lived experience. She has exhibited at Serpentine Galleries and ICA London; HKW, Berlin and Jeu de Paume, Paris. She has also screened her films at Sheffield DocFest, Vision du Réel, Dharamshala International Film Festival, Abandon Normal Devices and Impakt Festival. Emma was nominated for the New Talent Award for her film ‘White Mountain’ at Sheffield Doc/Fest in 2017. She is the recipient of a 2015 and 2017 Arts Council England award, British Council UK- China Connections Through Culture grant and The Elephant Trust fund. Charles’ films are held in two museum collections at Guangdong Museum of Art in China and The ZKM | Centre for Art and Media Karlsruhe in Germany. Emma holds an MA in Photography from the Royal College of Art. Ben Evans James is a filmmaker and curator whose work engages with narratives that lie outside landscapes constructed by global capital. He is the film curator at transmediale festival in Berlin, co-founded the London project space South Kiosk and is an AHRC funded PhD candidate under new media theorist Prof. Beryl Graham. His latest feature film On A Clear Day You Can See The Revolution From Here premiered at Visions du Réel in 2020. James is based between Vancouver and Berlin.