Long-Covid and the Culture of Disbelief

A film that fell sick with long covid and a creative, personal-political exploration of what gives rise to doctor’s disbelief.

International Premiere

Artist Bio: Rowena Harris (they/them) is a queer, crip artist, researcher and educator based in London, UK. They engage time-based media through a variety of styles and techniques, including CG animation and archival footage. They often draw on their disabled and queer experience to pursue alternatives to ‘normative’ filmic paradigms, such as time, space, movement, narrative, and to explore and engage crip art praxis - coming to new ways of knowing the world through crip artistic doing. Operating primarily in contemporary art, their awards include the Elan Valley – MAC award (UK); DYCP Arts Council England; SPACE residency (UK); Rupert Residency (LT); Sainsbury’s scholarship The British School at Rome (IT). They have had recent solo exhibitions with Phoinix (SK); Las Palmas (PT); The Gallery Apart, (IT); Coleman Projects (UK). And group: Ormston House (IE); Trafó (HU); Culturegest, Fidelidade Art Porto (PT); MAC, Copperfield Gallery, Space In Between, Tenderpixel, The Bluecoat, Bloc Projects, Flat Time House, The White Cube, The Barbican, Karst (UK), Agnes Varis Centre, (NY, US); Fondazione Memmo, Artissima, Galleria D’Arte Contemporanea O.Licini, (IT). They are in the final stages of their PhD in Crip Art Praxis at Goldsmiths College, UK, where they also hold an MFA (2010), and a BA Fine Art from Falmouth University, UK (2008). @rowena_harris / rowenaharris.com More about the film: Entwining the personal with the socio-political this moving-image work explores the impact and activation of myalgic encephalomyelitis’s (M.E) socio-medical past upon present long-covid experiences. Utilising shifting image quality - abutting CG animation; VHS home movies; smartphone; archival and contemporary found footage - the moving-image work offers crip time as poetic, of what it is to be within uncertain sense and, via a self-reflexive subtitled voice, of a film that thinks itself as sick.

More about this film: Entwining the personal with the socio-political this moving-image work explores the impact and activation of myalgic encephalomyelitis’s (M.E) socio-medical past upon present long-covid experiences. Utilising shifting image quality - abutting CG animation; VHS home movies; smartphone; archival and contemporary found footage - the moving-image work offers crip time as poetic, of what it is to be within uncertain sense and, via a self-reflexive subtitled voice, of a film that thinks itself as sick.