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.
PROGRAMME:
Lawrence Lek, Chapter 8: Lyric Video (Extract from AIDOL), 2019. 12 min.
Meriem Bennanil, 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.
