soft enclosures
soft enclosures
An auxiliary programme to Artists’ Film International: Dream States
Screening, exhibition and events featuring works by Laurent Azemi, Nora Bzheta, Astrit Ismaili, Saodat Ismailova, Marko Gutić Mižimakov, Radical Sense, Miloš Trakilović and Jelena Visković.
Co-curated by Old Mountain Assembly, Rebecca Edwards and Rina Meta.
26 - 27 September 2025
FormaHQ, Peveril Garden Studios
140 Great Dover Street
London, SE1 4GW
Programme
Friday 26 September
19:00 - 21:30 pm
Exhibition opening & launch of the new Radical Sense reader published on the occasion of soft enclosures.
Sign up here
Saturday 27 September
11:00 - 12:30
Surrealist poetry workshop and reading group of the new Radical Sense reader made on the occasion of soft enclosures, led by Old Mountain Assembly
Sign up here
13:00 - 14:00
In conversation: Jelena Visković and Jelena Sofronijevic, recorded for EMPIRE LINES podcast
14:00 - 16:00
Reading group of the new Radical Sense reader, led by Doruntina Vinca.
soft enclosures
An auxiliary programme to Artists’ Film International: Dream States
Screening, exhibition and events featuring works by Laurent Azemi, Nora Bzheta, Astrit Ismaili, Saodat Ismailova, Marko Gutić Mižimakov, Radical Sense, Miloš Trakilović and Jelena Visković.
Co-curated by Old Mountain Assembly, Rebecca Edwards and Rina Meta
26 - 27 September 2025
soft enclosures showcases works that use surrealist poetics to explore the connection between technology and the tender articulations of restoration, reconstruction, and resistance, often embedded in post-war realities. This curated selection of works underscores that fiction, especially within the context of their production, is not a layer of abstraction or mere cosmetic intervention. Instead, fiction operates as a part of lived reality, shaping and reshaping perceptions. soft enclosures will present moving image work and publications by artists who intertwine political (science) fiction and surrealism within narrative media, spanning film, performance, and print.
As an auxiliary programme to Artists' Film International: Dream States, the works presented resonate with the non-hierarchical and lateral approach of AFI'25 and further expand upon it’s exploration of borderless programming. soft enclosures offers a counter to fixed geographies by platforming artists who originate from areas of changing borders and identities, in-flux states, and areas of profound political transformation. These artists come from contexts where the very act of storytelling becomes a method of resisting the fictions imposed by white enclosures, colonial legacies, and rigid political apparatuses, further harnessing dreaming as powerful tool for emancipation.
In conversation with the wider Dream States programme, through playful yet transformative forms, these artists craft narratives that challenge dominant frameworks, using surrealist poetics and speculative fiction as mechanisms to reimagine communal futures and articulate resistance in deeply personal and collective ways. Their work occupies a dreamlike yet resolute reality where fictions themselves are tools for survival, restoration, and empowerment.
Astrit Ismaili, Love Research (2016), video stills. Images courtesy of the artist.
Jelena Viskovic, Motonation (2024), video stills. Image courtesy of the artist.
Jelena Viskovic, Motonation (2024), video stills. Image courtesy of the artist.
In addition to the exhibition, Radical Sense will compile a new collaborative reader. Radical Sense is a radical feminist reading group convened at 28 November in Tirana, Albania, collectively run by Silvi Naçi, Doruntina Vinca and Leah Whitman-Salkin. Founded in 2018, it has created a space that allows for reading, listening, and thinking together, as well as creating bonds of community and solidarity. Editing, compiling, printing, and binding unique Readers which trace and rediscover feminist, radical, queer, trans, Black, Indigenous and other marginalised voices, they explore pathways that allow collective reimagining for a better and more equitable world. For soft enclosures, Radical Sense is editing, producing, and binding a reader that includes texts submitted by the participating artists, the organizers, and Naçi, Vinca, and Whitman-Salkin, around notions of border crossing, murky and flowing waters, surrealism, resistance, and friendship.
What binds the artists together in soft enclosures is their introspective approach to fiction as a tool to interrogate and connect lived experiences. Their work explores storytelling and worlding as transformative processes, working through dreamstates where the boundaries between the real and the imaginary blur. These dreamlike frameworks become spaces for envisioning new realities and reconfiguring existing narratives. The artists engage with cybernetic bodies and identities by rearticulating the notion of freedom through fragmentation and reassembly. Transformation unfolds here not through grand, epic gestures but through the insistence of subtle, shapeshifting narratives. In these works, freedom is not declared but felt, reimagined and continuously reassembled within the porous boundaries of history, intimacy and fiction.
The exhibition takes its name from White Enclosures by Piro Rexhepi referring to the geopolitical and social structures that maintain and protect whiteness in the overlapping regions of Eastern Europe and Western Asia, often at the expense of marginalised communities. Some of the films are created in the regions of former Yugoslavia and the Balkans, where surrealism primarily manifests through post-war politics of nation building (around the borders of “Europe”) that shapes how relations of power are perceived and lived. This mechanism requires a constant process of transformation as a form of resistance against such (often divisive and oppressive) political realities, not only in immediate situations but also through history. The transformation can only happen through complete re-articulation of notions around identity and freedom, without the need to tell grand, epic stories. Instead, finding meaning in subtle, transformative narratives within this shapeshifting political landscape.
Marko Gutic Mizimakov, Lov na zmajice/Dragon Hunt (2024), video stills. Images courtesy of the artist.
Marko Gutic Mizimakov, Lov na zmajice/Dragon Hunt (2024), video stills. Images courtesy of the artist.
Soadat Ismailova, Melted into the SunMelted into the Sun (2024), video stills. Images courtesy of the artist.
Melted into the Sun
Saodat Ismailova
single-channel video, 35’50”, 2024
The work is inspired by the ambiguous figure of Al-Muqanna (“The Veiled One”), a dyer who became a spiritual and political agitator in eighth-century southern Central Asia, while it speculates about the cultural and political echoes of his revolutionary ideas. Al-Muqanna preached an ideological syncretism of Zoroastrianism, Mazdakism and Buddhism, and awakened the minds of his “White-Clothed” disciples by shedding light on the status quo of his time, challenging practices of land exploitation, authoritarian centralized power, religious repression. His legacy, which might be seen today as “proto socialist,” was appropriated by the regional Soviet propaganda machine as a nativist heroic example of how to rise up and fight for the communal sharing of property and wealth. Embracing a cyclical understanding of history and knowledge where meanings are unstable and constantly remade, the artist re-imagined Al-Muqannaʿ’s preachings and invited the influential Uzbek poet Jontemir Jondor to embody a modern version of the charismatic leader. The film takes us to the banks of the Amu Darya river, the round burial ground of Chillpiq, and the city of Bukhara, all of which were said to have been touched by Al-Muqannaʿ’s legendary deeds, such as summoning a second moon from a well. But also to the charred door found in the Zoroastrian fortress of Kafir-Kala that depicts the water goddess Nana being worshipped around an altar of fire, and to Soviet infrastructures such as the Kirov Reservoir and the solar furnace of Uzbekistan. This visual time travel looks at Al-Muqannaʿ’s mastering of illusion and science for demagogical purposes and reflects on the central role that technology and the manipulation of the Earth have played in sustaining power structures since ancient times. Together, the lyrical sequences, complete with reflections and glinting light, and the textural, non-diegetic soundtrack, metaphorically address the twofold aspect of the history of Al-Muqannaʿ—who eventually fell into the darkness which he opposed, turning his ideal citadel into ashes—while continuing to make his powerful and still-unanswered questions reverberate in our own time.
Commissioned and produced by Fondazione In Between Art Film and co-produced by Batalha Centro de Cinema Porto for the exhibition Nebula 2024.
Love Research
Astrit Ismaili
single channel video, 4’18”, 2016
Love Research examines the contrast and harmony between non-binary bodies and elderly bodies, two groups often sidelined by societal systems that prioritize youth, productivity, and rigid gender norms. In this context, the alter-ego The Pregnant Boy serves as an extension of the artist’s persona, designed to free the body from its historical and biological context. Drawing inspiration from male seahorses, known for their unique role in reproduction, the alter-ego proposes a new form of embodiment that resists traditional reproductive narratives. However, unlike the seahorse, The Pregnant Boy never gives birth; instead, it remains in a state of perpetual pregnancy—an embodiment of potential, ever-evolving through different iterations of the work in each performance.
Through this, Love Research not only reimagines the body as a mutable, speculative form but also uses fiction as a radical tool of narration. By questioning and extending the possibilities of bodily experience, it envisions a future where the body itself becomes a technology for speculative fabulation—transforming, redefining, and opening new paths for existence and connection.
Motonation
Jelena Visković
single-channel video/6-channel video, 21’51”, 2024
Motonation is a sci-fi biker film set in near-future Belgrade following the story of Čedo, a member of a counterculture movement called Happy Nation, as he embarks on an adventure beyond the commune’s boundaries with the help of a hacked city-motorcycle. The journey explores Čedo’s relationship with movement, his motivation to tap into a world of desire and expression that extends beyond the social and spatial boundaries of Happy Nation. The film explores movement, body-politics and performance in former Yugoslavia and in the region today. The characters face comedic alienation both when it comes to performativity of past narratives, and in relation to neoliberal ideas around freedom and community. Using the motorbike’s role as a literal driver/vehicle for transformation, it presents this alienation and discomfort as necessary and transformative tools for self-determination.
Choreography - Marija Iva Gocić; Costume Design - Jawara Alleyne; Editing - Dragana Jovanović; Sound - Tamás Marquetant; VFX - Erratas: Maximillian Schmoetzer and Harry Sanderson.
Lov na zmajice/Dragon Hunt
Marko Gutić Mižimakov
single channel video, 17’29”, 2024
Inspired by the tradition of Dragon Hunting described in Samuel Delany's novel "Stars In My Pocket Like Grains of Sand," this experimental short combines machine learning, dance, and a queer road trip through the weirdening landscape of the Dalmatian Hinterland into an exploration of mimicry, media translation and friendship.
Echolocation
Nora Bzheta
2-channel video installation, 9’54’’, 2024
“Echolocation” represents the continuous undulating process of Nora’s practice that begins and ends with water, inspired by her aquatic travel from Albania as a baby and her identity that remains at Sea. “Echolocation” retreats below the water’s surface and attempts to look through the turbulent waves of bureaucracy and encounter where the water originally came from (the stars).
I Tend to Cross Paths with Beautiful People
Laurent Azemi
Single channel video, 3”20’, 2020-2021
This video is part of my wider project Come Out and Play, a body of film and photographic material created during my year living in Prishtina during Covid-19 from 2020 to 2021. Titled after the childlike spirit present in the lives I documented, Come Out and Play explores moments of intimacy, rebellion, community and self-expression amidst the restrictions of the time.
Shot on camcorder, the video captures the hedonism and vitality of friends, peers, strangers who became my subjects. It’s a raw document of late nights, after parties, after-after-parties as well as stiller moments of the in-between. But while the visuals pulse with urgency and joy, the spoken poem, written after my return to London, offers a slower, more reflective voice. Layered over original music, it becomes a meditation on impermanence, identity, and the emotional residue of home.
Through collage layers and footage, this piece is a fragmented portrait of the city and self, refracted through time and distance. As someone raised between Kosovo and the UK, I’ve always existed between places, between languages, between versions of myself. This work exists in that in-between: both celebratory and melancholic, full of love and also haunted by what could not be held. The poem speaks of becoming the current others flow through, of embodying both the artist and the art, of carrying home rather than seeking it. These words echo the emotional rhythm of the film, an inner journey rendered through sound and image.
Colorless Green Freedoms Sleep Furiously
Miloš Trakilović
single channel HD video, 24’45”, 2023
In the film Colorless Green Freedoms Sleep Furiously the color green poetically interweaves different storylines about freedom, visibility, and memory. The work is based on conversations between Trakilović and his mother about their lives during the war in Bosnia and their arrival in the Netherlands as refugees. In the film, she shares how a patch of green grass at the refugee center – so alive, green and lush – momentarily freed her from the experience of being in a warzone. The work embarks on a quest to retrace and recreate that moment through diverse visualization techniques, unfolding as a poetic dream sequence that shifts fluidly between simulated and existing landscapes. Filmed in the Netherlands and Bosnia and Herzegovina, the work unfolds as an inquisitive and poetic dream sequence that challenges the hegemonic role of vision and truth in the narratives of war, displacement and visual culture at large — ultimately invoking the invisible, unrelenting spectral forces that shape the memory and experience of war.
Laurent Azemi, I Tend to Cross Paths with Beautiful People (2020-21), video stills. Images courtesy of the artist.
Nora Bzheta, Echolocation (2024), installation view at Tirana Art Weekend 2024. Photo by Jozefina Vokrri.
Miloš Trakilović, Colorless Green Freedoms Sleep Furiously (2023, video stills. Images courtesy of the artist.
Biographies
Laurent Azemi is a multidisciplinary artist working across film, photography, poetry, visual arts & performance. Born in London and raised between there and Kosovo, his work is influenced and shaped by this duality of place & memory. Azemi moves across mediums, using storytelling as a tool for self-exploration and wider cultural dialogue — often navigating themes of identity and belonging through a diasporic perspective. His past projects include State of Mind (Brunel Museum, 2018), a multidisciplinary art show exploring identity and healing through painting, installation, and performance. In 2022, he presented COME OUT AND PLAY (793 Gallery, London), a solo exhibition redefining his personal perception of home while documenting the hedonistic youth culture of Prishtina during the restrictive times of Covid-19 lockdowns through photography, collage, poetry, and film. His COME OUT AND PLAY photo collection was also displayed at the DIASWHORA Festival (Acud Macht Neu, Berlin, 2024).
laurentazemi.com
Nora Bzheta’s practice takes the form of water, inspired by her aquatic travel to the UK as a baby, and by their undocumented identity as an Albanian. Nora intuitively works with organic materials gathered and foraged whilst travelling. These materials enter a recurring ritualistic process of hydration and dehydration. Algae, seaweed, sand, denim, clay, metal, bike parts, glass and bones are among the materials that appear in the work. The continuous camouflaged interrelations between geographies and bodies are explored through installations, writing, sculpture, video, sound, drawings and performance.
norabzheta.com
Marko Gutić Mižimakov is a visual, performance and text based artist living between Brussels and Zagreb. They are interested in shaping sensory materials through intimate, collaborative and social processes. In their work bodies, as well as digital and palpable objects, are animated, choreographed and sung into non-orientable forms via different media and processes of translation. Often borrowing from queer science fiction they see their work as a speculative technology of mutual transformation. From May 2022 until September 2023 they were an artistic researcher at a.pass. Currently they are an adjunct faculty member at the Academy of Fine Arts, Zagreb.
Their works have been exhibited, screened and performed at The Museum of Contemporary Art Zagreb, Beursschouwburg Brussels, V2 Institute for Unstable Media Rotterdam, Ostrale Biennale Dresden, Antimatter BC, City Museum of Ljubljana, The Museum of Contemporary Art Skopje, D2 Kunstraum Leipzig, Galerija Močvara Zagreb, Galerija Nova Zagreb etc.
performing.site
Astrit Ismaili explores in their performance practice the transformational potential of bodies and spaces. Their work proposes bodies that consist of both imaginary and material realities, using alter egos, body extensions and wearable music instruments to embody different possibilities for becoming. Through these elements, they think of, about and through the body: as it transforms and is transformed, as it moves, makes sound and makes contact, as it extends and exceeds itself, reaching out to and touching the other.
Their research is based around ‘Creative Under Limitation’; a notion deriving from their practice. Through this notion they look into fictional, historical, scientific or personal references that deal with physical or socio-political limitations by using creativity as a tool to confront boundaries and restrictions by often creating something new. The researched material is used for ‘world building’ and is embodied in their performance, video, sound, drawing and sculptural work.
Astrit Ismaili’s central interest is how bodies are constructed and interpreted through contemporary society, but also how they are heard, asking what it means to sonify a body politic. Exploring the politics of the body and voice, they aim to disrupt conventional narratives, imagining new and utopian ways of thinking, how bodies inhabit and occupy space.
@astritismaili_
Saodat Ismailova is an Uzbek filmmaker and artist from the first post-Soviet generation in Central Asia. Weaving memories, myths, rituals, and dreams into the tapestry of everyday life, her films explore her region’s historically complex and layered culture, at the crossroads of different realities, migrations and colonial legacies. Drawing on her personal history, Ismailova delves into the collective dimension of memory and the global resistance to the impact of human activity on the environment. Frequently based around oral stories in which women are the lead protagonists, and exploring systems of knowledge suppressed by globalized modernity, her works encapsulate these consciousness hovering between visible and invisible worlds. Her research spans ancestral knowledge and landscape transformation in the region in more recent histories. She incorporates archival film footage or textile elements from vernacular traditions that also allow for the continuity of artisanal activities that may soon disappear
saodatismailova.com
Miloš Trakilović is a Bosnian-Dutch artist. He obtained an BFA and MFA from the University of Arts in Berlin where he graduated in the Experimental Film and New Media Art department. His practice revolves around the politics of perceptibility exploring issues of dissolution; fragmentation, memory and loss. His topical interest is the role of vision in the construction of meaning and production of power following the digital turnover. Trakilović's work primarily engages with digital and time-based media, with film, video, and installation as central elements.
His work has been presented in Kunst Werke, Berlin (2025) National Art Center, Tokyo (2024) Grazer Kunstverein, Graz (2023) Trafó Gallery, Budapest (2023), Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2022), Centre Pompidou, Paris, (2021) Badischer Kunstverein, Karlsruhe (2021); Ljubljana Biennale of Graphic Arts (2021) Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna (2020) Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, Berlin (2019) among others.
Trakilović was a resident at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten from 2022 to 2024. He lives and works in Berlin. milostrakilovic.net
Jelena Visković is an artist born in 1989 in Zagreb, raised between Belgrade and Budapest, currently working in London. She works with recreation, situation, disobedience and play to challenge dominant power structures in techno-scientific and cultural narratives. Her films, games and sculptural works incorporate playful, animated, talking objects that make their way into technologically deterministic, seemingly inanimate systems. Borrowing from a cartoonish, carnivalesque logic, these worlds become rebellious but approachable, attempting to resist the enclosures of borders, institutions, archives and databases. Her practice involves working as an educator, software developer and consultant for design studios, artists, formal and informal organisations interested in working with games and technology. She is a Lecturer in Game Design and Interactive Media at UCL CCM since 2021
jelenaviskovic.net
Old Mountain Assembly is a London based collaborative initiative connecting practices and ideas about the Balkans and beyond alongside Bayr(y)am Bayr(y)amali and Angelina Radaković.
@old.mountain.assembly
Rebecca Edwards is a London based curator, writer and producer. Her interests include cultivating experimental curatorial methods, interweaving fluid approaches to production, dissemination and representation of artwork, and exploring the nested fields of technology, digital aesthetics and internet culture. Rebecca was the curator at arebyte from 2017 - 2024. She is currently a co-host of Future Artefacts Podcast and access worker for artist Petra Szemán.
rebeccaedwards.xyz
Rina Meta is a Writer, Publisher, Creative Producer based in Prishtina, Kosovo and London, UK.
@metarina
Radical Sense is a radical feminist reading group convened at 28 November in Tirana, Albania. It is collectively run by Silvi Naçi, Doruntina Vinca, and Leah Whitman-Salkin. Founded in 2018, Radical Sense is a space of reading, listening, and thinking together, as well as a space for creating bonds of community and solidarity. Together we edit, compile, print, and bind unique readers—tracing and rediscovering feminist, radical, queer, trans, Black, Indigenous, and other marginalized voices, exploring pathways that can allow us to reimagine and practice the futures we want to see. We have produced 20 volumes (and counting!). During the pandemic we moved to Zoom, making it possible for the Albanian diaspora and wider communities, strangers, family, and friends to join. Translation is at the core of Radical Sense, and we have produced and distributed two volumes of collective translations. For Soft Enclosures, Radical Sense is editing, producing, and binding a reader that includes texts submitted by the participating artists, the organizers, and Naçi, Vinca, and Whitman-Salkin, around notions of border crossing, murky and flowing waters, surrealism, resistance, and friendship.
Jelena Sofronijevic is a producer, curator, writer, and researcher, working at the intersections of cultural history, politics, and the arts. Their independent curatorial projects include Invasion Ecology (2024), and they produce EMPIRE LINES, a podcast which uncovers the unexpected flows of empires through art. They are currently pursuing a PhD with Gray’s School of Art, Aberdeen curating exhibitions of Balkan and Yugoslavian/diasporic artists in British art collections.
jelsofron.com | @empirelinespodcast
soft enclosures
An auxiliary programme to Artists’ Film International: Dream States
Screening, exhibition and events featuring works by Laurent Azemi, Nora Bzheta, Astrit Ismaili, Saodat Ismailova, Marko Gutić Mižimakov, Radical Sense, Miloš Trakilović and Jelena Visković.
Co-curated by Old Mountain Assembly, Rebecca Edwards and Rina Meta.
26 - 27 September 2025
FormaHQ, Peveril Garden Studios
140 Great Dover Street
London, SE1 4GW
Programme
Friday 26 September
19:00 - 21:30 pm
Exhibition opening & launch of the new Radical Sense reader published on the occasion of soft enclosures.
Sign up here
Saturday 27 September
11:00 - 12:30
Surrealist poetry workshop and reading group of the new Radical Sense reader made on the occasion of soft enclosures, led by Old Mountain Assembly
Sign up here
13:00 - 14:00
In conversation: Jelena Visković and Jelena Sofronijevic, recorded for EMPIRE LINES podcast
14:00 - 16:00
Reading group of the new Radical Sense reader, led by Doruntina Vinca.