Al-Akrab-copy

Tobias Zielony

PYLON-Lab is delighted to present "Al-Akrab" (2014) by Tobias Zielony as an online screening.

The film will be on view from August 24 until August 28 and is a collateral event of the screening program INSOMNIA, curated by PYLON and currently on view at the physical premises of TICK TACK Antwerp, Belgium.

The screening program INSOMNIA features video works of seven international artists:

Yalda Afsah

Mit Borrás

Steffen Goldkamp

Vika Kirchenbauer

Thomas Taube

Jeroen Van der Stock

Tobias Zielony

INSOMNIA deals with different levels of reality as well as the phenomenal and psychological processes associated with the night and the motif of sleep. The films portray notions of isolation and solitude, restlessness, subculture and the occult, as they question the twilight states of in-betweenness – the interstice between logic and the delusion.

A selection of films will be streamed here on our website during the month of August:

4th - 8th | "ADAPTASI CYCLE - ARCYRIA" by Mit Borrás

9th - 13th | "After Two Hours, Ten Minutes Had Passed" by Steffen Goldkamp

14th - 18th | "Dark Matters" by Thomas Taube

19th - 23rd | "Night Horse" by Jeroen Van der Stock

24th - 28th | "Al-Akrab" by Tobias Zielony

Al-Akrab (2014)

In 2014, Zielony made two films while working in Ramallah for two months. „Al-Akrab“ (The Scorpion) pays homage to the opening scene in Luis Buñuel’s “L’Âge d’or”, which premiered in 1930.

Four young women huddle in a dark room, their white headscarves and dresses gleaming bluish in the black light. A disco? A laboratory? A hospital? They busy themselves with a scorpion, which is first alive, then dead; its skin dazzlingly fluorescent. The women – they are high school students in a village in Palestine – meticulously photograph the animal; it emerges that they are making an animated film in which the dead scorpion returns to life as if by magic.

The fruit of their efforts plays as a film within the film toward the end of Zielony’s surreal production, which crackles with minute passions, subtle eroticism, and nuanced archetypes.