Mascara Film Club #40: Ree Bradley

Mascara Film Club #39: Ree Bradley

Date: Thursday 18th September

Time: 7pm

Location: Newington Green Meeting House

Mascara Film Club presents a double-bill screening of two films by artist Ree Bradley, followed by a Q&A discussion with the artist.

Working at the intersection between social practice and documentary filmmaking, both films use the format of participatory workshops to variously explore embodiment, identity, wellbeing, language, and collective experience, drawing on traditions of radical pedagogy and experimental performance.

Ree Bradley, Glossolalia, HD video, 2021 (54 mins)

Set on a single stage in East London, Glossolalia hosts a method acting class, in which actors are trained to access and utilise their unconscious and irrational nature, alongside an Accent Softening Course for Business, whereby international workers learn the ‘Standard English’ accent so as to help further their careers in the UK. Interspersed throughout are a series of scenes, including children learning phonics and a contortionist performing, which further question our conditioned relationships to language, behaviour, and pedagogy.

Ree Bradley, The Mind is a Group Muscle, 16mm, 2025 (34 mins)

The Mind is a Group Muscle is an ongoing project that seeks to question socialised masculinities' relationships to mental health through alternative body-based therapies.

For this first iteration, a group (including the artist) explored Rebirthing breathwork, Picture Tapping Technique and Dance Movement Psychotherapy. These practices enable access to unconscious and childlike states buried in the body and breath, offering alternative places to question constructs of masculinity and its relationships to mental health. The project’s title references Yvonne Rainer’s 1968 performance, The Mind is a Muscle, drawing a link between histories of feminist dance and the use of body therapies to deconstruct notions of masculinity.

Aspects of the group's experiences together are shared in this film through 16mm film and therapeutic drawings. The wider social project included a somatic consent session for the group in response to the footage with the ability to veto any images of themselves they didn't wish to be included. Furthermore, each member of the group owns an equal financial share in any funds received from the distribution of the resulting artwork.

Programme:

• Ree Bradley, Glossolalia, 2021 (54 mins)
• Ree Bradley, The Mind is a Group Muscle, 2025 (34 mins)

About Mascara Film Club

Mascara Film Club is an artist-run film club, which mostly takes place in North-East London. Taking place outside both film festival circuits and institutional art spaces, we screen artists’ moving image in more convivial contexts. We understand film screenings defined less as the relation between film and spectators in hushed rooms, but rather as performative and social events where the critical intimacies of friendship and community can come to the fore. Through our programming we seek to bring into conversation films and people, and foster a self-organised infrastructure for moving image practitioners. Mascara Film Club is organised by Rufus Rock, Daisy Smith, and Katarzyna Łukasik.