thread, chain, beads and tacks
2024 | Turkey & UK | 16mm & 35mm film transferred to video | 2 minutes
Made with thread, chain, beads, tacks, hex nuts, bolts, steel eye pins, hooks, clasps, tracing paper, prints, IKEA paper measure, bobby pins, 35mm photographic film strip, 16mm film strips, nail polish, screenprint, mesh fabric and lace.
Sound by Bo Deurloo.
Cosmic Rays / I’m Not Your Monster / March 2025, North Carolina, US (world premiere)
The Film-maker’s Cooperative / The 12th Annual New Year / New Work Festival / 18 April 2025, NY, US
Wild Iris / St. Peter’s Church, De Beauvoir Town / 8 May 2025, London, UK
viewing copy available upon request
For her film “thread, chain, beads, and tacks” (2025), Kazdal played with the filmstrip like a fidget toy. Painted, screenprinted, cut, stickered, and rayographed with thread, fabric, and metal tools, the filmstrip becomes itself a plastic doll to dress and undress in material. Inspired by Dadaist Man Ray’s classic short film “Le Retour à la raison”, that similarly featured silhouettes of screws and bolts, and by Annabel Nicolson’s performance “Reel Time” (1971), in which the artist ran film through a sewing machine as it was simultaneously being projected. Kazdal’s film updates the tactile film genre with today’s techniques, pairing it with an exhilarating soundscape that rings of absorbent discovery. In 1926, Fernand Leger published “A New Realism – The Object”, which advocated the use of film in order to emphasize the graphic and plastic value of simple objects such as “a pipe—a chair—a hand—an eye—a typewriter—a hat—a foot, etc., etc” (p. 96). He claimed that finding beauty in such quiet tools was never possible before the use of the camera, with light as its prime decorator, as a deliberate and controllable eye. Artists like Ray, Nicolson, and Kazdal go beyond Leger’s wish to beautify the everyday tool. In “threads, chain, beads, and tacks” patterns of thread and tools are indeed turned into loving layouts to witness as they whirr past the screen on the film reel. So does another smaller filmstrip, carrying with it vignettes of caterpillars and the sea. Its sprocket holes glide along within the bigger film strip, a mother caught in child’s web. Within this meta-moment the filmstrip itself is love-objected in its own dress-up. As it is adorned, sectioned off, and ultimately tampered with, the filmstrip’s plasticity is rendered apparent, but so is its vulnerability. Ironically, the dress-up game has rendered it naked. A naked eye with its own scopes and limits.
- Ester Freider, Viscera: On the intimate technics of film with Ela Kazdal
poster by Lili Fourmestraux