ARW 2025 | BASIR MAHMOOD and MAX KUTSCHENREUTER - joint programme

BASIR MAHMOOD and MAX KUTSCHENREUTER - joint programme
Het Documentaire Paviljoen, Podium
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BASIR MAHMOOD - Narrative us Recite 

Narrative Us Recite is a discursive presentation by Basir Mahmood, reflecting on his decade-long artistic research into the Lahore-based film industry known as Lollywood. 

Once among the world’s largest film industries, Lollywood experienced a dramatic collapse in the late 1970s. Growing up in a neighborhood where its main studios stood, Mahmood witnessed the slow disappearance of its traces—including a personal connection through a song his father wrote for an unfinished film. In this presentation, he explores how artistic research becomes a generative tool to confront disappearance, transforming archival absences into creative possibilities. Rather than preserving Lollywood’s ruins, Mahmood asks: how can a film industry be considered ended if it still holds the potential to tell? What forms of storytelling emerge from spaces marked by denial, disappearance, and erasure? Can the medium of film itself become an imagined site for those physical locations that have been taken away? 

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MAX KUTSCHENREUTER - This is not my history, yet I see it in you

Through the weaving together of larger and smaller historical queer narratives, cinematic work and performance, This is not my history, yet I see it in you is a performance lecture that traces back the origins and the potentiality of the queer gesture. 

On the night of June 28, 1969, the Stonewall riots in Greenwich village, New York broke out, an event that becomes tied to the pride parades in June as a commemoration. It is a beat in worldwide gay liberation. We claim these moments and embody them. Are there more traces that we have embodied that we often don't actively acknowledge? Do we claim these global histories too easily? 

Through a combination of archival material, distant histories, personal stories, and a performance practice, artistic researcher Max Kutschenreuter will trace in his performance-lecture the different lineages of the research he conducted within the Master of Film, titled: In motion, we remember to resist.  

 The performance lecture will focus on the lineages of queer gestures and their potentiality as a method of documenting embodied histories.  The lecture will conclude with a performance, in which the audience will be choreographed. Investigating together the use and potentiality of one such gesture: the look.  

This event is part of the Master of Film – Artistic Research Week 2025