Sheffield DocFest Arts Programme 2021

Sheffield DocFest is an international film and arts festival with a mission to spark imaginations and empower our capacity for change by celebrating, championing and debating documentary film and art as a collective form of engagement. 

The 2021 Sheffield DocFest Arts Programme includes a range of activities, from exhibitions and talks to events and new commissions. This diverse programme, supported by Arts Council England, is free and open to all, and works towards bringing the contemporary arts sector in the UK into dialogue with a wide scope of international artists’ reflections and contexts.

Centred around three group exhibitions curated by Herb Shellenberger and Soukaina Aboulaoula,  this year’s edition will feature the work of over 30 artists from around the world. The 2021 edition of the festival is a hybrid presentation, with several exhibitions in galleries across Sheffield, while the whole programme is freely accessible worldwide via the Online Exhibitions Platform, including exhibitions and events specifically curated for the online space. 

Here in This Room is a group exhibition at Site Gallery, S1 Artspace and online. The exhibition focuses on the dual concepts of “domestic ambience” and “domestic surrealism,” considering the ways that artists have depicted or reimagined living spaces, domestic labour/routines, or many different ideas of home. Intended as a productive feedback loop with the extraordinary circumstances that led many of us to be “stuck at home” for many months on end, Here In This Room looks to the ways that artists have seen domestic spaces differently. 

Featuring works of moving image, performance and sound, Right on Time, is a group exhibition curated for Sheffield DocFest’s Online Exhibitions Platform that highlights the voices of artists who do not necessarily adhere to the traditional definition of “time” and “temporality.” Their works offer new paths of possibilities, and evoke, both through their subjects and visuals, a structure which merges past, present, future and beyond. Thus, Right on Time unfolds as a collective, open-ended encounter with time(s).

Dialogues: Emily Chao and Al Wong is a double retrospective aiming to illuminate these artists’ practices individually and even further through this double reflection. A cross-generational pairing of two Asian American artists based in the San Francisco Bay Area, this dialogue will unite their work across a gallery exhibition, an accompanying screening and a talk where they will meet for the first time. Dialogues: Emily Chao and Al Wong can be viewed at the Sheffield Hallam University Performance Lab and online.

Other highlights include festival commissions In Posse by Charlotte Jarvis (in partnership with Site Gallery) and Alex Tyson’s two-channel moving image installation The Registry. The DocFest Arts Programme have also commissioned Right on Time Radio, a temporary web radio station, including performances, discussions, contemporary literature, and sound experimentations. The featured broadcasters are: AWU Radio, Himali Singh Soin, Karim Kattan & Yasmine Benabdallah, Les Bonnes Ondes, Listening to the more-than-human (a collaboration with DocFest Exchange), micro.radio and Yasmina Reggad.

Film screenings include Canadian-Japanese experimental filmmaker Daïchi Saïto’s 35mm landscape film earthearthearth and Georges Lacombe’s 1928 silent city portrait La Zone, also projected on 35mm. Sam Smith’s desktop performance E.1027 will be presented live in Sheffield and livestreamed online. 

Artists and contributors: Al Wong, Alex Tyson, Anuj Malhotra, Ash Moniz, AWU Radio, Basir Mahmood, Bassam Al-Sabah, Charlotte Jarvis, Daïchi Saïto, David Haxton, Deborah Findlater, Duncan Marquiss, Emily Chao, Geraldine Snell, Gian Spina, Heesoo Kwon, Himali Singh Soin, Huniti Goldox (Areej Huniti & Eliza Goldox), Julie Ramage, Karim Kattan & Yasmine Benabdallah, Les Bonnes Ondes feat. Layal Rhanem, Lina Laraki,  micro.radio, Mohammad Shawky Hassan, Mona Benyamin, Pallavi Paul, Sam Smith, The School of Mutants, Séamus Harahan, Sophie Michael, Tabita Rezaire, Wanja Kimani, Yasmina Reggad, Zara Zandieh

The Sheffield DocFest Arts Programme is on view in Sheffield and online from June 4–13. It is free and open to all worldwide, and is supported by Arts Council England. Further information here.