The Magic Circle
2023, 10 minutes, 16mm transferred to digital, colour, sound, Ireland
Reminiscent of the ‘trance films’ of Maya Deren or Kenneth Anger, The Magic Circle unfolds in a timeless dusk where an archetypal sorceress ritualistically navigates magical circles. A double figure executing doubled gestures, the circles she engages with are also double: the protective circle of sand or fire surrounding the enchantress and the circle of the self-reflected through circular mirrors. Within the Magic Circle is the self, a place of fragile refuge that is also a nightfall where she constantly encounters and passes through herself. This unsettling and melancholy meditation is at once ornate and minimal, displaying Pour Hosseini’s mastery of light and composition to haunting effect.
Trailer: watch HERE
Remnants of a Rite
2023, 45 sec, loop, 16mm transferred to digital, colour, silent
Remnants of a Rite, loop video installation, as part of The Magic Circle exhibition
More info HERE
The Flower People
2021, 5 minutes, super 8mm transferred to digital, colour, sound, Ireland
The name comes from the Neanderthals’ symbolic use of flowers to mourn the death of one of their own. "The Flower People is at first glance an anthology of gorgeously coloured vintage images of flowers, animals and the camera people documenting them. Yet Atoosa Pour Hosseini brings a characteristic touch of unease to this deceptively simple work through introducing a subtle tension between nature and the artificial means of cataloguing it. Who, ultimately, is looking at whom?"
Intervals
2020, 9 minutes, Interval 1 (3min), Interval 2 (3min), Interval 3 (3 min), HD, Ireland
'Intervals' video series was conceived during the challenging time of 2020. The three video pieces condense and gasify the notion of time concurrently. All three, both reveal and conceal the passage of time. In doing so, they allow the viewer to observe this but also to be caught within the situation. It is both lyrical and literal in its treatment of time passing timelessly.
The Golden Mask
2020, 20 mins, Super 8mm, Ireland, Germany, Serbia and Bosnia & Herzegovina
The Golden Mask draws on one of civilization’s most ancient and potent objects, the mask, to explore psychic and territorial displacement. Magisterial yet marginal masked figures haunt edgeland spaces like refugees from a mysterious cataclysm. The eruptions of unsettling bursts of found footage and gloriously decaying images of ruins set these beings adrift in time as well as space. Ultimately, only the mask remains, golden and unchanging amidst the desolation of history.
Trailer: watch HERE
Antler
2018, 15 Minutes, Super8mm, Ireland
Inspired by the famous Voynich Manuscript, a 15th century book written in an unknown language and featuring detailed drawings of plants that do not exist, Antler transforms a botanical garden greenhouse into a laboratory of perception and a film set. Nature sampled and presented for study in this setting is equated with natural phenomena framed and captured on film. But rather than taming or normalising nature, these study aids function as cues to oneiric immersion in a vivid but utterly elusive world.
Trailer: watch HERE
Superimposed Kinetics
2018, 2mins, loop, 16mm, Ireland
"Atoosa Pour Hosseini's exhilarating bird's eye perspective of the ocean employs richly saturated 16mm colours and dizzying camerawork in creating a shamanic vision that sweeps beyond the limitations of human perception."
Kinetics
2018, 11minutes, 16mm transferred to digital, colour, sound, Ireland
The masked female figures that wander adrift through Pour Hosseini’s intensely lyrical explorations of displacement find their most energetic form in the bird-woman at the centre of Kinetics. Shot in saturated 16mm colour, this dreamlike film follows a primeval female figure exploring an ancient landscape poised over an endlessly blue sea. She is at once alienated from and engaged by her surroundings, which suggest a site of self-discovery as much as one of profound disorientation.
Trailer: watch HERE
Refining the Senses
2017, 13 minutes, Super & Standard 8mm transferred to 4K, Switzerland, Iran & Ireland
The artist sits spinning wool at a site of memory as image and reminiscence fluctuate between the personal and the general, the pictorial and the material. Bodies wander, landscapes echo each other, and time is unwound through a carefully wrought approach to 8mm celluloid. Between the persistence and fragility of the moving image, the senses are refined.
Excerpt HERE
Gleanings
2017, 8 minutes, Standard 8mm transferred to 4K, Switzerland & Ireland
Super-8 memories emerge and vanish into the imageless texture of scratched celluloid, an object at once very present and channelling long absent moments of ambiguity. A soldier allows a little girl to handle a gun, a machine like the camera that links a calm present with war and death. But who is watching this film? Whose footsteps are pacing? Who is invading and appropriating these memories?
Excerpt HERE
Mirage
2015, 3:30 minutes, Super8mm, Iran / Ireland
Mirage evokes a desert landscape but it is the cinematic image itself that is the mirage. Working with the material textures of Super-8 film, Mirage presents two visual planes: the captured image and the surface of the film strip itself. The relationship between these is as much one of conflict as mutual support.
Excerpt HERE
Oasis
2015, 7:30 minutes, Super8mm, Germany / Ireland
Figures emerge from and retreat back into the waters of the oasis, coming forward to greet the eye of the Super-8 camera. The scene initially appears idyllic. But the alien scrutiny of the artificial eye is sinister, at cold cross-purposes to the human warmth it brushes against.
Last Phase
2014, 1:56 Minutes, HD, colour, sound. White rock, Killiney Dublin Ireland
When engaging with Last Phase one is immersed in the experience of being submerged and emerging. Through a moving image that is at once appearing and disappearing, it revolves around this tension between two distinct conditions.
(video/sound installation) - Documentation HERE
Clandestine
2015, 15 minutes, Super8mm, Estonia / Ireland
Layers both space and time, superimposing imagery and creating entrancing patterns of repetition and startling interruption. Voyaging from one land to another, from found footage to mysteriously evocative scenes shot by the artist to the pure abstraction of hand-scratched film, it traces a haunting inner logic of memory and discovery.
Excerpt HERE
Another Time
2012, Ireland
Another Time is an atmospheric semi-documentary / semi-experimental video that was made during the creation of the "Production" which is an experiment in collaborative exhibition-making.
Watch HERE
Incubus
2013, 1:30 Minutes - DSLR- Switzerland / Ireland
"Incubus"is a highly saturated nightmarish unsettling video work that explores unconsciousness nature of memory and its relationship with moving image and sound.
Watch HERE
Luminosity (1)
2013, 5 Minutes - DSLR - Ireland
Luminosity is a five minutes audio-visual digital moving image drawn from material made in response to the environs of Gunpowder Mills Ballincollig Cork, woodland scattered with 19th century industrial ruins. In these images, the character wanders through this landscape, exploring it in a complex series of multiple superimpositions that include a semi-transparent black rectangle and the compounded relationships between sound and moving images is functioning to extract time from the traditional horizontal passage of a single-channel film/video and to draw the 'memory' on screen into the present moment through working on 'layers' both within the moving image and in the space around it.
Luminosity (2)
2013, 2:25 Minutes - Scanned hand drawing, DSLR, HDV Super8mm Video Projection- Ireland
Drawing forms the starting point of Pour Hosseini’s work, with a sketchbook providing storage for the noting down of ideas and for experimentation with forms that are developed into autonomous drawings and audio/video works. Ideas are triggered through observations made during everyday life, but also through memories. She tends to create a very personal space, which is both uncanny and obscure, favouring nostalgic and dreamlike atmospheres.
Reflected
2011, 2 minutes, Ireland
"Reflected" is a haiku-like moving image piece that focuses on rhythmic and atmospheric nature of water to create dreamlike environments with an urban aesthetic.
Watch HERE
Dimensions
2013, 6:26 Minutes - DSLR HDV Super8mm Video Projection - Ireland
“Dimensions” is a moving image with sound, made of various techniques such as multi-layer projections, manufactured lighting, hand-altered mechanism and interposing objects. Its minimal approach and saturated colours creates a formally challenging audiovisual experience.
Watch HERE
Then
2011, 5 Minutes - Scanned Hand Drawing, Digital Manipulation & Digital Post Production - Ireland
"Then" examines the mysterious world that has been embedded in memory of time and space, a virtual universe which exits somewhere between reality and dream. Images in "Then" progresses and dissolves into another and creates a haunting audio / visual experience.
Watch HERE
Silences
2011, 3 minutes, Iran / Ireland
"Silences" is a short moving image piece with a sense of eerie and fear. The saturated colour and fluid attribution of it can suggest a nightmare-like experience.
Watch HERE