Arnolfini celebrates ambitious new talent in moving image throughout spring and summer 2026 in partnership with Film and Video Umbrella.
FVU New Takes is presented in Arnolfini’s Dark Studio, showcasing a new work every month by one of six early-career artists working in moving image, each commissioned by Film and Video Umbrella.
Artists
Mahdy Abo Bahat, Anna Engelhardt, Hantao Li, Morisha Moodley, Jameisha Prescod and Lucy Rose Shaftain-Fenner.
Each of the FVU New Takes artists offer a bold and inventive approach to storytelling and form, addressing many contemporary themes including ‘the global climate crisis, crip filmmaking, body politics, state violence, archival memory, and contemporary trans+ and British culture’.
Using diverse practical techniques, from analogue film to 3D animation, these works highlight the breadth and ambition of the UK’s emerging moving-image landscape.
FVU New Takes programme
Hantao Li: Giants’ Anatomy
28 February — 31 March 2026
In Giants’ Anatomy, Hantao Li imagines a speculative afterlife for decommissioned North Sea oil platforms within a liminal landscape.
Cromarty Firth, known as Scotland’s ‘oil rig graveyard’, is home to numerous decommissioned offshore platforms whose futures remain uncertain. Some are transported thousands of miles away to ship-breaking yards, where the environmental consequences can be conveniently overlooked, while others sit dormant, awaiting reactivation.
Combining real-world footage with computer-generated imagery, the film explores questions of meaning, memory and infrastructure. At once absurd and strikingly plausible, the work blurs the boundaries between truth and fiction, asking: when infrastructure loses its function, does it still hold meaning?
Watch the film here.
Lucy Rose Shaftain-Fenner: Tgirls Make Music
2 April — 10 May 2026
Tgirls Make Music is a documentary centred on trans woman rapper and producer htmljones (Ishaani Ponniah), framed through the visual language of early-2000s television, 2010s internet aesthetics and British popular culture. The work is structured around an intimate interview hosted by trans woman Lucy on the fictional T4T (Trans for Trans) Network, presented in the style of a TV talk show.
Interwoven with htmljones’ live musical performances, the conversations are direct and personal, punctuated by regular bumper ‘ad breaks’. Animated idents recall the colourful nostalgia of networks such as MTV and Nickelodeon, reimagined through a contemporary trans lens to create a playful yet powerful visual world.
Watch the film here.
Anna Engelhardt: Cues
12 May — 16 June 2026
Cues examines interrogation as a performed scene, staged through gesture, repetition, set-up, and technical props. Taking the polygraph as its recurring prop, the work traces the script that structures interrogation. The formulaic scenes from police training films and film noir are punctured by a near-human test figure that shadows the characters’ movements, pulling their choreography into view. Across these fragments, interrogation reads like rehearsal. Repeated often enough, its staged action turns into procedure.
Watch the film here.
Morisha Moodley: Sideweighs and Backwords
18 June — 26 July 2026
Sideweighs and Backwords is an experimental film by Morisha Moodley that explores memory, migration and language.
Using monoprint to recreate archival footage, Moodley highlights memory as something constantly reshaped through retelling and reflection. Moving between a homeland and a new home, the film combines fragmented text, narration and sound to create an experience that invites multiple interpretations.
Sideweighs and Backwords by Morisha Moodley is presented in three consecutive versions:
1. No Audio Description / Descriptive Subtitles
2. With Descriptive Subtitles
3. With Audio Description
Total loop duration: 24 minutes 45 seconds
The programme will loop through each version continuously throughout the day.
Watch the film here.
Jameisha Prescod: I’ll Still Be Here When You Return
28 July — 6 September 2026
I’ll Still Be Here When You Return is a moving image work exploring the space between sleeping and waking during a chronic illness flare-up. Drawing on the artist’s own experience of illness and disability, the film reflects on pain, memory, isolation and recovery, while questioning a society that values productivity over care. Using 3D scans of the artist’s bedroom during post-surgery recovery, shifting point cloud animations dissolve into one another beneath a calm, meditative voice-over.
Mahdy Abo Bahat: The Wretched of the Clouds
8 September — 4 October 2026
The Wretched of the Clouds is an ongoing film project resisting the culture of forgetting and erasure shaped by post-revolution Cairo, Egypt.
The film follows Mahdy as he searches an old cassette recording of Quran recitations for a poem once recorded by a departed friend. As the tape is rewound, the poem dissolves into prayer, and remembrance slips into hallucination.
Evoking the exhaustion of a time left behind, the film treats memory as an excavation — uncovering fragments of a lost future buried within a repressed history.
FVU New Takes is a Film and Video Umbrella initiative in partnership with Arnolfini, supported by Jerwood Foundation. FVU is supported using public funding by Arts Council England.
About the Artist
FVU New Takes
FVU New Takes is a new commissioning initiative from Film and Video Umbrella, developed in response to the growing need for meaningful mentorship, commissioning and exhibition opportunities within the moving…
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