This Radiant World: Recent and Retrospective Experimental Films is a four-program series of exceptional experimental films from the last few years, complemented by several newly restored and preserved retrospective works. Many of the films comment directly or indirectly on the anxieties and uncertainty of the past two years; others serve as joyful and playful counterpoints. Together, they demonstrate the continuing richness of experimental cinema, the history of which is exemplified by this selection of lesser-known works that are overdue for rediscovery and reappraisal. 

From appropriation of dominant cinematic archives, to critical scrutiny of film techniques, the 12 modern and contemporary artists' works presented in this program exemplify an alternative and highly self-reflective form of cinema. Following Erika Balsom’s understanding of contemporary art as a potential “laboratory for film, a place in which its social, technological and aesthetic history can be picked over and recycled,” they reconsider what cinema is (or was) and what it can do. With an emphasis on the ideology behind the operation of filmic apparatus and the technological externalization of memory and time, the works in this program expose critical and aesthetic potentials of “an other cinema,” oscillating between white cube and black box.