Atelier 25

15 NOV 2025
Studio KDB, 1st Floor, Persistence Works

Joseph Cutts is pleased to present a screening programme of artists’ film and moving image. Atelier 25 welcomes the work of six UK and international artists exploring areas of contemporary belief systems within CGI worlds, centuries of racial whitening ideology in Brazil and grief within the homeland.

Curated as part of Joseph Cutts' studio presentation for Yorkshire Artspace's Annual Open Studios.

In order of screening, the works in the programme are:

BETTER OFF ALONE
BFI Playa | 1 mins | United Kingdom | 2022
Better Off Alone is an adaptation of the much loved Europa Cinemas trailer, previously used before feature films across the United Kingdom, before European funding became a distant memory due to the impact of Brexit. Nearly 6 years on, are we better off alone?

REDEMPTION
Mariana Luiza | 19 mins | Brazil | 2023
In 1911, during the Universal Races Congress in London, the representative from Brazil presented a painting titled “Ham’s Redemption” (A redenção de Cam). Featuring a black grandmother, a mestizo mother, a white father and their light-skinned infant at the centre of the frame, the painting became a symbol of the racial whitening ideology in Brazil throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. More than 110 years later, artist Mariana Luiza—who identifies as Black—critiques Brazil’s racial legacy and offers a poetic, counter-colonial answer to the painting in an immersive installation.

FEEL MY METAVERSE
Keiken, George Jasper Stone | 36 mins | United Kingdom, Germany | 2019
Built within a game engine, it is set in a not too distant future where the climate crisis has rendered the Earth uninhabitable. Corporation Alipay promptly disseminated life units. Inside these life units, humans live in a Metaverse of virtual worlds; worlds that feel as real as the Earth. To survive in these virtual worlds, humans must earn points to keep their base bodies alive.

Analysing contemporary belief systems, the work plays on our understanding of reality and the idea that we can create our own future through the stories we collectively believe in. It contemplates how individuals can be required to trust, suffer and live in realities that they intuitively disagree with. The work critiques the disconnection of monopolising desires of corporate and futurist visions in relation to inequality and the climate crisis. It also explores technology as an emancipatory tool, deconstructing physical limitations through sensory understanding and elevating unheard voices.

RIVER IS MY HOMETOWN
River Yuhao Cao | 8 mins | China | 2021
River is My Hometown reveals a perspective of a revenant through a short film (revenant: one that returns after death or a long absence).

Where to return? Artist River Cao glimpsed the potential answer to this question in Rilke’s poem “in my invisible landscape, the most beautiful, you make me more angel-known, those are invisible.” – Duino Elegies (1923). As the hum of mourning began to arise, a traditional funeral ceremony “Plead for Water” from his hometown helps to return him as a revenant to a homeland that transcends the geographic concept, it’s a place more private and intimate, where the emotion of grief has been reconsidered since then.