Featuring works by: Rachel Shearer, Louise Menzies, Fiona Amundsen, Vea Mafileʻo, Natasha Matila-Smith, Alex Monteith, Martin Sagadin, Sriwhana Spong.
Curated and chaired by CIRCUIT's 2026 curator-at-large Anuj Malhotra, Contours of a Summoning features eight artists works commissioned by CIRCUIT between 2015-25. The films are presented in sections bookended by a conversation between Anuj Malhotra and CIRCUIT Director Mark Williams. Presented as a live event at the EMAMI Art Film Festival in Kolkata, with Mark in Wellington and Anuj in India, the conversation is described by Anuj as follows;
"A conversation that will illustrate and enliven CIRCUIT's institutional narrative as a moving image collection based out of Aotearoa New Zealand. It will stage a shared contemplation that will develop through four movements: the story of the institution’s genesis, the strategies it employs to navigate the peculiar circumstance of distance from the anointed global centres of moving image art practice, the relational infrastructure it has cultivated over the last decade and finally, its present imagination of its future.
The exchange will be plotted as a poetic recollection of the particular set of zeitgeists within which CIRCUIT developed as a proposition, the first series of encounters that provided it with contours, the daily labour that began to inhabit these outlines and the organisation’s attempts to adapt to the fresh spiritual, technological, cultural and social revolutions that continue to arrive at its anvil.
The conversation will install the oneiric alongside the banal and the enigmatic next to the ordinary; it will counterpoint the more dramatic components of CIRCUIT's history with mentions of practical challenges, logistical hurdles, bureaucratic issues and compliance regimes. The idea would be to unravel the romance as it coagulates around cinephilic or cultural work and allow it to be studied through parameters that are structural. Eventually, the audiences at the festival will be invited to observe the tangible and intangible components of the narrative of a moving-image organisation and think of what resonates, confounds, complicates and remains."
All works shown have been commissioned through CIRCUIT's annual curatorial programme 2015-25 and are presented in association with the publication of CIRCUIT: Dialogues in Artist Moving Image.
Emami Art Experimental Film Festival (EAEFF) is a platform based in Kolkata, India dedicated to curating and building discourse around alternative and experimental films, videos, and artists’ moving-image practices. Through extensive year-long programming, EAEFF features innovative practices and critical interventions through screenings, workshops, masterclasses, and conversations.
