B-N-L

Prompted by interwoven structural and personal stresses, artist-filmmakers Henry Bradley, Solveig Qu Suess, and Blanca Pujals started having monthly meetings in January 2022 to share and collectively reflect on their practices. These regular exchanges provided a support structure, nurturing their individual practices and enabling change and mutual influence. In a recent screening and artist talk at the Critical Media Lab in Basel, they decided to intertwine their projects, tracing thematic threads across techno-scientific optics, intergenerational trauma, memory, and modeled futures, rather than displaying individual works. For Rehearsing Retreat, the artist-filmmakers reflect on the method they developed together and how it informs the design and conceptualization of film screenings and presentations.

Henry Bradley

Henry Bradley is an artist and filmmaker. Working across socially-engaged performance and cinema, he creates staged documentaries. He is currently investigating educational and performative practices designed to rehearse future ecological scenarios. These traverse modelling spaces, animal tracking, citizen rehearsals, and state drills. Often set in a single room or building, his films use the constructs of theatre and architecture to physically bring different people, events and ecologies together — both as an act of community-building on a local level and to question forms of management at the scale of capital.

He graduated from the Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths University of London, in 2017. Since then he has undertaken residencies and exhibitions internationally with Gasworks, London; Institute of Contemporary Arts, London; BBC, UK; The Room Projects, Paris; LUX, London; HALLE14, Centre for Contemporary Art, Leipzig; Fondazione Prada, Venice; Jerwood Arts, London; Kasseler DokFest, Kassel; PS2, Belfast, among many others. He is a selected studio holder at Studio Voltaire, London, and will be a 2023 residence at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, USA.