10 – 28.3.2024 Workshop and Performance
Gross Encounters
with Reem Saleh and Noam Toran
Gross Encounters is a workshop and performance festival dedicated to body horror, hauntings and transdimensional travel, engaging with the politics of monstrosity and alienhood by honoring low-brow, low-budget and low-resolution horror, trash and sci-fi productions, their fandoms and their scholars. The workshop will end with a public performance at OCCII (tbc).
The workshop and performance festival is part of the Gross Encounters Film Club, created and organised by Reem Saleh and Noam Toran, now running in its 4th year.
@_grossencounters_
Biographies:
Reem Saleh
Reem Saleh spawned in Beirut, where they spent most of their time watching bootleg 144p films torrented through a dodgy internet connection. They’re a designer, writer and keeper of the Cookbook. In 2019, they initiated a body of work — dedicated to teenage girls in distress — revisiting the history of exploitation cinema, with a focus on the anti colonial, queer and feminist struggles at play in a selection of subgenres. They also examine the work of fandoms, past and present, offline and online, in irreverently taking ownership of set narratives through shared means of knowledge production. In true geek fashion, their work expands upon niche anecdotes and footnotes to weave intricate, outsider histories. During workshops, they speak about low-brow culture as a site for resistance of hegemonic conditioning and building community with the past.
Citing from their recent research, they invite participants to engage with filmic texture and to consider poor images, traveling at high speed through time and space, as alternate archives of subordinate expressions. Their main project at the moment tackles issues of horror, grief and memory in haunted homes and screens, and are currently finalizing a fantasy video game that repurposes bits of the amateur and handmade internet, to be shown in Paris in 2025.
https://teenagefangirl.ensci.com/
@pacificreem
Noam Toran
Noam Toran emerged out of a primordial ooze buried in the Chihuahuan desert, and spent his childhood sneaking into the Castro Theatre to gorge on triple bills of Noirs, Westerns, Slashers, and sci-fi B movies. His artistic and teaching practice seeks to disrupt imperial and colonial legacies through transgressive, cross-dimensional and a-temporal storytelling, and strives to honour and celebrate various counter-hegemonic expressions of genre fiction, recognizing them as sites for resistance and empowerment which subvert traditional narratives and reshape historical perceptions. His work is screened, published, exhibited and collected internationally. He is currently writing a semi-autobiographical horror-western, binging on Indonesian exploitation films, and learning from his amazing students.
@noamtoran