Open Secret: The Second Edition continues as a series composed of screenings, conversations, and workshops with artist and guest curator Aman Sandhu.

This series takes its departure from Fred Moten’s words that “poetry investigates new ways for people to get together and do stuff in the open, in secret.” Similarly, cinema’s capacity to condition spaces for gathering, and the double maneuver of opacity and transparency inherent in its making sets the precedent for this sort of investigation embedded in collaboration.

Aman’s film program invites us to consider the use of archival material. Searching through archives especially familial ones, might provoke and intensify the discovery of that which has not yet been told. Aman touches on this compulsion of the search, toward that which has not yet been experienced, through his art practice and research on the effects of the rupture in sound and moving image. By making this break, the films in this program have affinities with Afrological improvisation, which moves through “known-knowns,” only to diverge and allow the new to come through. This immersion in improvisation creates unexpected movement and a rhythm that is always already in emergence: what is possible when form deviates and transforms?

​

Supported by the David McTavish Art Study Fund, Queen’s University.