Visions in place film screening: an afternoon of shorts exploring places both real and re-imagined
Saturday 6th December 2025 , 12:00pm to 4:00pm
Join us for an afternoon of boundary-pushing films, with an intimate screening of a curated selection of Visions shorts by Dorothy Cheung, James Edmonds, Lauren Heckler and Shanzay Subzwari, Umi Ishihara, Simon Rattigan, Fanxi Sun and Karen Russo.
The films, though varied in their subject matter, are each rooted in place, whether real or re-imagined, and the layering of histories and mediation of identity that occur there. Selected because they speak to the works exhibited in Onyeka Igwe’s Programme 2, the afternoon offers the chance to be drawn into further realms and ways of being.
Event Schedule
1pm – 2pm: Screening Part 1
Lauren Heckler and Shanzay Subzwari, Sister Sing a Song (there’s a shallow answer and then there’s the deeper answer) (2025), 16min27
A short film shaped by the physical and virtual travel between the artists’ countries.
A shared melody sung as a nursery rhyme in the UK and a Christian tribute in a Pakistani Convent School are sung together. In a hybrid watch party, the Pakistani film Jinnah (1998) is beamed to Shanzay in Karachi from Lauren’s living room in London, after the two were unable to source the film in Pakistan. Scans of passport visas and colonial relics interject. Costumed in matching blouses and dresses sourced in Carmarthen (Wales), and waistcoats (vascuts) from Hunza, apples are used as symbolic props to reflect on stories of origin, cultural bridging, and ideas of journeying, connection, play, beauty, life, death and power.
The chapters layer into one another to ask: can histories be absorbed in ways that foster empathy and an understanding of nuance? Can tenderness transcend borders and be carried forward?
Umi Ishihara, Thundergod (2024), 18min
Thundergod is a narrative experimental film that explores the motif of lightning as a random chance encounter. It examines histories of mythology, religion, resilience and acceptance. The film is set in a small, imaginary mountain village in Japan, known for its frequent lightning strikes. It tells the story of an underground club that only those who have survived lightning strikes are invited to perform in. The characters in the film are drawn into continuous conflict with the animal world as they encounter many crabs throughout, becoming a metaphor for both desire and danger.
Karen Russo, Sinkholes (2024), 18min40
Taking its starting point the rapid drying of the Dead Sea, Sinkholes is a dystopian vision of a world in which water has become scarce. Following the voiceover of its protagonist, Lawrence, the story unfolds through documentary scenes shot in Israel and Palestine. While the sites are real, the narration transforms these into the ruins of a society, doomed to a world in which it has ceased to rain. Following Lawrence in his journey to find water inland, Sinkholes imagines a moment in which time has come to a standstill, where technology and society has devolved to simpler forms and the planet has regressed to inorganic processes. Threading together references to a history of artists fascinated by entropy and the post-human Sinkholes is a mediation on our desire for survival and resignation in the face of the possibility of extinction.
2pm – 2:30pm – INTERVAL
2:30pm – 4pm: Screening Part 2
Simon Rattigan, RiverView (2024), 12min44
A river divides territory and is at once a way in and a way out, where tidal shifts push and pull one’s desires to go and explore the beyond, while old loyalties hold onto the past weighing down one’s need to escape.
The Thamesmead estate in Southeast London was built in 1968 in brutalist concrete architecture and placed at the margins of the city. Named after the river, proclaiming its connection to the heart of the metropolitan centre and out to the rest of the world.
Shot in 16mm, black and white film, echoing artist John Latham’s work Encyclopaedia Britannica of 1971, utilizing in-camera split screen and double exposure to explore ideas of psychogeography and synchronicity.
James Edmonds, Songs Overheard in the Shadows (2025), 22min22
Balanced on the edge of what is visible, everything comes from nothingness and returns to nothingness. Strands of consciousness trying to convene with each other. Forms of personal significance in a time of crisis, set free into random motion through chance operations. Recurring details point towards a centre.
Fanxi Sun, I kept following until I realized what was true (2025), 3min47
A film about walking, moving, traveling, and migrating; about the choreography of camerawork and the art of editing; about playing with sound and images; about making a statement. It also serves as Sun’s farewell to the city of Richmond, Virginia, USA, where she lived for three years until the summer of 2024.
Dorothy Cheung, as a bird that briefly perches (2025), 16min52
Departing from Cheung’s personal experience as a diasporic artist, this three-part video work is a cinematic diary that weaves together her sentiments about homeland with reference to the geology of Hong Kong; an analogy between human nature and greenhouse gardening; and her reflections on the choice of living abroad as she studies the everyday life of migrant farmers and their adaptation on foreign soil, reinterpreting agricultural processes and the migration of species. The work explores the implications of rooting, re-rooting and growing as the artist contemplates on the evolving dynamics between land and human.
This event will take place at the Nunnery Gallery, 181 Bow Road, London, E3 2SJ.
Doors of the Nunnery Gallery will open at 12pm, with the film screenings running from 1pm to 4pm. The Nunnery Café will be open until 4:30pm, selling their usual fare of delicious drinks and snacks.
More about Sister Sing a Song
‘Sister Sing a Song’ is the ongoing collaboration between Lauren Heckler (Wales) and Shanzay Subzwari (Pakistan). Together they have been making and researching since 2022, following the British Council project, Llif / بہاؤ / Flow.
Meeting virtually and in each other’s countries, they are building textures of attention, memory, and cultural exchange, whilst navigating colonial legacies and the movement of information across and between nations. Divided by borders, united by feeling, they’re seeking freedom in understanding. Their work asks, can tenderness transcend? Can an aura of care become something future generations sense, hold, and add their own threads to? Can histories be absorbed in ways that foster empathy and an understanding of nuance?
They are currently showing video work and curated objects in the exhibition ‘Tigers & Dragons: India and Wales in Britain’ at the Glynn Vivian Gallery, Swansea.
More about Shanzay Subzwari
Shanzay Subzwari is a visual artist, educator, and writer whose practice spans contemporary miniature painting, video art, and papercutting. She holds a BFA from Indus Valley, Karachi, and an MFA from London Metropolitan University, awarded through the British Chevening Scholarship. Her work has been exhibited in the UK, USA, Italy, Turkey, Pakistan, and Switzerland, and featured in residencies and seminars across Europe. Collected by institutions like the South Asia Institute, Chicago, her work bridges art and fashion through her brand, House of Subzwari. She hosts The Art Lounge Talks, the Nigaah Art Awards, and is a finalist for the 2025 Study UK Alumni Awards for Culture and Creativity.
More about Lauren Heckler
Lauren is an interdisciplinary visual artist, educator and creative producer from Llansteffan, Wales. With a process shaped by dreaming, field research and collaborative dialogue, they have specialist skills in the somatic camera, audio-visual essay, and disability led film making. Interested in explorations of the embodied archive, digitally mediated experience, and (post)colonial narratives, Lauren’s art reflects on personal, social and planetary health to find new frames: of reference, of thought, of exchange.
Lauren is a graduate in Fine Art: Critical Practice from the University of Brighton, and in 2024 completed the MA in Screendance at the London Contemporary Dance School. Notable past works include co-leading on the creation of a Studio Response public sculpture trail, being Artist in Residence at Cadw’s Castell Coch with a public showcase, and co-leading a 6-month community engagement project for the National Trust, exploring how people and place are impacted by climate change. Their work has been exhibited across the UK, Europe, Japan, Pakistan and India.
More about Umi Ishihara
Umi is a London-based artist and filmmaker from Japan. She creates experimental narrative films that interweave personal memory with broader social realities, exploring themes such as politics, community, and the quiet alienation experienced across different social classes.
Growing up around nightlife, with a mother who worked in club bars and a father involved in Japan’s underground free-rave scene, she was immersed early in spaces shaped by music, transgression, and emotional complexity. This background continues to inform her practice, which often involves close collaboration with non-professional actors—local residents and people from her immediate surroundings—whose lived experiences bring intimacy and authenticity to the screen.
Her work has been shown and screened in museums and film festivals worldwide, including The Centre Pompidou, ICA London, BFI Southbank, South London Gallery, International Film Festival Rotterdam, CPH:DOC, The National Museum of Art Osaka, Fukuoka Art Museum and Tokyo Photographic Art Museum. She was selected Bloomberg New Contemporaries 2019 and Awarded GQ Global Creativity Awards 2024. Also directed work broadcasts on the BBC4.
More about Karen Russo
Karen is an artist living and working in London. Her work blurs document and narrative in an exploration of how knowledge, perception, and culture intertwine the rational with the obscure. By tracing marginalized practices, obscure phenomena, and esoteric forms of knowledge through film installations, drawings, writing and photographs, she addresses the legacy of transgressive means for understanding the unseen and the unknown.
She has exhibited in such venues as the Whitechapel Gallery; Barbican; Hayward Gallery Project Space; V&A Museum; Tate Modern; Delfina; Towner Eastbourne; Paradise Row Gallery, London; Busan Biennial; Athens Biennial; Montevideo, Amsterdam; Grosse Kunstschau Museum, Worpswede; Haus der Kulturen Der Welt: HKW, Berlin; Krefeld Museum, Krefeld; Arquebuse Gallery, Geneva and more.
Karen’s films have been screened in numerous festivals including Oberhausen, Ann Arbor, Werkleitz, Kasseler Dokfest and EMAF to name a few. She is a Film London Jarman Award Nominee (2023).
More about Simon Rattigan
Simon is an artist working with moving image media to discover new configurations of history, memory, and personal shared experience. His practice encompasses collecting ephemera, researching archival documents, image making and audio exploring. Forming a synthesis of real and illusory phenomena entering into social, biological and technological histories.
In his work the materiality of digital media, film and video is processed and interlaced to evoke questions of authenticity, hierarchies of knowledge and cultural belonging. Occupying a hybrid ‘in-between space’ in which we materially and psychologically reconstruct and redefine our relationship to the past and other temporal conditions such as causality, potentiality and inevitability.
More about James Edmonds
Trained as a painter, James is an artist-filmmaker from the UK living in Berlin. His practice centres on a personal poetics in which the nature of recording, particularly when approached from the materiality of a medium, offers a tangible yet ultimately paradoxical surface for what is intangible and fleeting – our personal experience, inner worlds, thoughts and reflections. His work manifests in analogue films, painted gestures and long-form soundworks and texts, occasionally combined along with found objects or materials to create immersive environments.
He has presented screenings and exhibitions at various art and cinema events, including, TIFF Toronto, NYFF New York, First Look at MoMI New York, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen, Curtas Vila do Conde, Open City London, FICUNAM Mexico City, and EXiS Seoul.
More about Fanxi Sun
Fanxi is an artist working with moving and still images, sound, and live performance. Rooted in subjectivity, her practice constructs symbolic experiences through narrative, formal, and conceptual relationships.
Her work has been exhibited and screened internationally, including at Woman Made Gallery, the Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art, Zhejiang Art Museum, Xiamen Three Shadows Photography Art Centre, Experimental Series – Salt Lake City, VIDEOAKTION, and the Odds & Ends Experimental Film Festival.
She is the recipient of the 2024 MAP Fund, the Jury Award of NEXTGEN 11.0, and was a finalist for the 21st Trawick Prize – Bethesda Contemporary Art Awards. Her residencies and fellowships include the Alex Brown Foundation, Craigardan Residency and Teaching Fellowship, and Mudhouse Residency. Sun holds an MFA in Photography and Film from Virginia Commonwealth University.
More about Dorothy Cheung
Dorothy is a filmmaker and artist from Hong Kong. Her practice explores the notion of identities and home through a double perspective – personal and political, memory and forgetfulness. Her moving-image works are internationally exhibited in Whitney Museum of American Art, Kunstinstituut Melly (formerly known as Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art) and EYE Filmmuseum, and selected for film festivals including International Film Festival Rotterdam, Leeds International Film Festival, Seoul Women’s Film Festival, South Taiwan Film Festival and Queer Lisboa. She has also received commission from M+ (Hong Kong), British Council (Hong Kong/UK), Jumping Frames Hong Kong International Movement-image Festival (Hong Kong) and Visual AIDS (US).
Access information
The Nunnery Gallery has step-free access throughout from street level, including to the accessible toilet, and is service animal friendly. This venue does not have a hearing loop system. Accessible parking is not available on-site.
If you have any questions regarding accessibility at this venue or event, would like to make us aware of any access requirements that you have in advance of visiting, or would like this information in an alternate format including Easy Read, please email nunnery@bowarts.com or call 020 8980 7774 (Ext. 3)
Access requirements could include things like providing equipment, services or support (e.g. information in Easy Read, speech to text software, additional 1:1 support), adjusting workshop timings (e.g. more break times), adjustments to the event space (e.g. making sure you have a seat near the entrance) or anything else you can think of!
Transport Information
Opening hours: Wed-Sun, 10am to 4pm
Address: Nunnery Gallery, 181 Bow Road, London, E3 2SJ
Nearest station(s): Bow Road (District and Hammersmith and City lines) is a 6-minute walk away, and Bow Church (DLR) is a 3-minute walk away.
Bus: 205, 25, 425, A8, D8, 108, 276, 488 and 8 all service the surrounding area.
Bike: Bicycle parking is located at Bow Church Station. The nearest Santander Cycles docking station is at Bow Church Station.
More about Visions
Visions offers an informed overview of the provocative and quick-changing mediums of moving image and performance, presenting works from across the world. For each Visions we run two to three programmes and invite lead artists, renowned for their innovation in the digital field, to head and inspire each one. The ideas of the lead artists support the selection process and set the tone for the wider exhibition.
More information about the Visions in the Nunnery exhibition here.