Sunday 30 November, 14:00
Meeting in the blue fold
a hybrid program developed by
Suns and Stars
meeting in the blue fold unfolds as a space of resonance and continuation, where gestures of care interweave across multiple practices and timelines. It is a shared duration, a horizon where tenderness and persistence coexist, where care becomes a form of futurity, and queerness, not as identity but as potential, gestures toward what is not yet here. (This conceptual framing is indebted to the foundational work of José Esteban Muñoz, particularly Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, New York University Press, 2009) Within this field, works, voices, and readings emerge in dialogue — sometimes simultaneously, sometimes in response to one another — each attentive to the others, each a continuation of the attentions opened by Jarman’s Blue. This collaboration takes shape through listening, reading, and the slow folding of questions that continue to open rather than close.
Doors open at 19:00
Program:
• Introduction words by Anastasija Pandilovska
• Caravaggio (2025) 15’ by Baha Görkem Yalım
• Root Time (2025) 15’ by Leon Filter
• Blue (1993) 79’ by Derek Jarman
• Q&A
Sunday 30 November, 14:00
Program:
• Root Time (2025) 15’ by Leon Filter
• Caravaggio (2025) 15’ by Baha Görkem Yalım
• reading in the blue fold, reading group developed as part of the program
• Blue (1993) 79’ by Derek Jarman
Note: Screenings are not listed in chronological order to encourage experiencing the program in its entirety.
Photo: Courtesy of Basilisk Communications Limited
Blue
Derek Jarman | 1993 | 79’
35mm film shown as high definition digital scan, colour and sound
In June 1993, Derek Jarman premiered Blue at the Venice Biennale — his final film, a 79-minute expanse of pure colour that has since disrupted the understanding of cinema. Drawing on his painterly background, Jarman discarded the multiplicity of the moving image for a single, unbroken field of International Klein Blue — a blank canvas that at once withholds and opens a door to infinite possibility. Across this field, voices and sounds move: memories, letters, hospital notes, meditations on love and mortality, fragments of poetry, and the simple yet radical act of continuing to speak.
Blue stands as a luminous threshold, an unbroken field of colour. Jarman invites us to perceive differently: to see through listening, to feel across distance, and to inhabit a space where perception, memory, and care converge. Time in Blue is elastic; past, present, and projected experience intertwine, and the viewer becomes part of a shared field of attention that trembles between presence and absence.
Made as Jarman’s eyesight was faltering due to cytomegalovirus and side effects from the experimental AIDS treatments, Blue transforms vision into touch; it turns cinema into listening. Through Blue Jarman unfolds a visuality that is all-embracing, profoundly incarnated and yet faltering. Crucially its absence of imagery is not merely a response to the loss of sight but to another kind of invisibility — that of the virus itself, whose presence could only be sensed through its effects. The monochrome becomes a field of invocation, a space where the unseen must be imagined, called forth from the void. In this alchemical process, fragments of sound and memory transform into a landscape of liberty — a vision more intensely real than any filmed or painted image.
Speaking from the nearness of death, Jarman refuses silence. Through mythic evocations, blue flowers, landscapes, and the memories of “blue-eyed boys,” Blue becomes a sustained act of conjuring — a voice that insists on presence within finitude. The film gathers tenderness and fury, turning illness and exhaustion into the material of continued address. The voices that move through it — those of Jarman, Tilda Swinton, Nigel Terry, and John Quentin — trace an affective landscape of illness, desire, devotion, and resistance. In a time when queer people faced severe isolation, exclusion from families, and even criminalisation—a period defined by government indifference despite issuing stark public health warnings—these friendships and collaborations forged a vital architecture of care. Blue reflects both the intimate and political dimensions of queer life under the shadow of AIDS, making present the tenderness, loyalty, and persistence of chosen kinship.
Blue endures as a living surface — tactile, responsive, and insistent — extending toward the bodies, memories, and attentions of those who encounter it.
A brief opening toward what might still be possible.
Caravaggio
Baha Görkem Yalım | 2025 | 15’
The first new commission for meeting in the blue fold is Baha Görkem Yalım’s Caravaggio (2025) — a meditative, single-shot film that exists at the intersection of excess and austerity. Bearing the name of Jarman’s 1986 Caravaggio, yet sharing with Blue a field of resonance — aesthetic, affective, and alive — Görkem’s work is both homage and disguise, a film that presents itself as something it resists becoming.
Two burning candles hold the frame as the only sources of both light and presence. They flicker like breath, performing illumination and disappearance at once. If Görkem’s earlier spatial installation Caravaggio (presented at the Rijksakademie Open Studios - Spring 2025) explored the “baroque fold” and the wound(ed) machine — an aesthetic of forming and deforming that questioned how love and labour persist within institutional and infrastructural decay — this new work turns that inquiry inward. The film brings the baroque’s excess into dialogue with Blue’s restraint, holding both in suspension. The act of burning becomes a radical offering: a gift of endurance and intimacy, a light passed between bodies. A dialogue — tuned to the rhythm of voice, breath, and flame — threads through the scene, merging breath and fire into a single, trembling presence. In Görkem’s practice, the film as medium becomes a delicate instrument of love: a means to stay with woundedness without surrendering to it.
Baha Görkem Yalım is a visual artist, writer, and educator. Görkem‘s praxis is multidisciplinary and defined by being purposefully in flux, refusing to crystallise in any one form or medium, and consequently attending to the moment of gathering and collision as their concern. They employ video, sculpture, and performance, sometimes in variations and always as folds of one and the same practice. In all variations, things come together toward durational proposals. Görkem‘s research is deeply rooted in language, writing, reading, re-reading, and misreading. Objecthood, abstraction, sleep, violence, and contamination are frequently thematised concepts. These are interrogated through the lens of infrastructural critique, often summoning questions of thermodynamics, geometry, territory, and refrain. These open questions come together in a desire to diminish art and artist as unified ontological categories.
Root Time
Leon Filter | 2025 | 15’
Also premiering within the program is Leon Filter’s new sound film, which listens to images, carrying the ghost of seeing. Developed along The Listening Group — a conversational and communal framework that attends to texts through listening — the piece turns reading into an act of entry: a way of approaching films through sound while keeping their images alive in another register.
Root Time unfolds as a quiet dérive, a walk home after the cinema, where fragments of memory and field recordings linger like blue flashes written into the retinal memory. Through anecdotal reflections — on the effort of keeping a plant from Jarman’s garden alive, on the way sounds recall the presence of light — the work returns to listen to images again. Here, listening is not the negation of vision but its transformation: an attention that gathers what trembles between language and silence, and resounds after the image fades. From this space of resonance, Root Time becomes a meditation on how cinema persists beyond its screen, how it lives on through the bodies that attend to it. A film, Leon suggests, is continuously remade each time we listen.
Leon Filter (1988) is an artist and researcher working with performative reading, video and publishing. In his practice, he examines conditions and historical and political implications of personal narratives, often in collaborative forms. His research's practical and theoretical concern for anecdotal knowledge and the connections it allows is influenced by documentary, essayistic and performative filmic practices, specifically under the aspects of self-organization, authorship and queer forms of artistic resistance.
Reading Group and Hybrid Program
The reading group within this collaboration is a way of being with texts, voices, and ideas that unfold through the senses — a way to stay close to what the words make possible. The readings move alongside the works, becoming a point of contact, a gesture toward touch, a continuation of listening initiated through the words of writers such as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Laura U. Marks, Fred Moten, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Etel Adnan, José Esteban Muñoz, and Michel Chion, among others.
This gathering is an experiment in listening as relation — to language, to breath, to the vibrations between thought and affect, to the moments when meaning hesitates and something else begins to emerge. It extends the intimate processes of the collaborative practice and the friendships that shaped this project, offering a possibility for continuation beyond the screening room in smaller constellations of readers and listeners.
Before the screenings, an online conversation with James Mackay, Jarman’s longtime collaborator and producer, will appear on In the Pause of a Gesture There Might Be an Echo. Following the screenings at Filmhuis Cavia, the project continues on the same platform with a new sonic correspondence by Anastasija Pandilovska, extending these gestures into transmission. Her voice moves through distance, carrying the blue fold beyond its visible frame, so that it can be experienced both in the dark of the cinema and through the quiet attention of one’s own space.
Suns and Stars are a nomadic art space and a platform for relational art practices and open-ended research. By nourishing non-prescriptive, process-based and cross-disciplinary alliances, we act as a temporary community in which artists and audiences codetermine which track Suns and Stars are heading for. Suns and Stars depart from “a notion of the common that focuses not on identity but on the shared resources and tactics of collective labour.” We seek to elucidate processes within artistic practices, and how these practices can become social spaces where alternative potentialities can be conceived and shaped.
Online program — In the Pause of a Gesture There Might Be an Echo
The online platform will host:
• Conversation with James Mackay
• Leon Filter’s sound film
• Anastasija Pandilovska’s sonic correspondence
The link will be available when we get closer to the event days.
As the cinema has limited seating, we kindly invite you to reserve a spot in advance by registering via anastasija@sunsandstars.nl