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

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.

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.