Filmhuis, The Hague
17.05.2025
doors: 20:00
event: 20:30 – 23:00
Tickets HERE
Matters of Being explores the possibilities of cinematic techniques, allowing our minds to wander and stumble upon new associations in the illuminating darkness of the cinema setting.
The cinematic experience for closed eyes Phosphène (30 min, 2022) by Armand Lesecq takes the audience on a ride into their own inner landscapes using projections onto the audience’s eyelids. Our Lady Who Burns (8 min, shot on 16mm, 2024) by Alice dos Reis explores how humans explain other-worldly experiences for themselves while mundane life continues. Leandros Ntolas will perform his cinematic video-game Benign Land (30 min, 2024) that journeys through fictional landscapes carrying remnants of Ireland’s past with a focus on the Troubles in Northern Ireland.
Armand Lesecq
Phosphène (Audiovisual performance, 30 min)
The Netherlands & France, 2022
Armand Lesecq (FR) is an artist working in the fields of sound, digital art, experimental music, and cinema. His work focuses on the relationship between perception, attention, and imagination. Through sound and/or visual compositions, he guides the viewer through inner, reflexive, and introspective meanders.
Phosphene is a film for closed eyes and spatial sound. It uses a video projection on the audience’s eyelids, a multichannel sound setup, and motorized directional loudspeakers. Inspired by dreams, neurosciences, and hypnosis, the composition explores inner territories between the surface of the senses and our reality-making processes.
Alice dos Reis
Our Lady Who Burns (short film, 8 min)
Portugal, 2024
Language: English subtitles
Funding credits: Botín Foundation and Foi Bonita a Festa
Alice dos Reis (PT) is a visual artist and filmmaker whose practice involves film, textiles, installation and publishing. Her films are done mostly alone or with a small crew and use diverse mediums, from 16mm to smartphones. Threading between autobiography and fiction, they are characteristically atmospheric, confusing historical and generational timelines and perceptions.
Our Lady Who Burns, shot on 16mm, is an atmospheric dream-like short film guiding us through the paranormal associations with Portugal’s mountain Serra da Gardunha. Formerly revered as a site of saintly apparitions, and now known for mysterious light sightings, it is rumored to have an UFO hangar hidden inside it. Could its mystical energy interrupt the gestation of an elderly cat’s pregnancy?
Leandros Ntolas
Benign Land (live-performance of the video-game, 30 min)
Northern Ireland, 2024
Funding credits: Household Belfast, Mondriaan Fonds, British Council Northern Ireland, Belfast City Council
Leandros Ntolas (GR) is an interdisciplinary artist whose work traverses installation, sculpture, drawing, and video games. His practice blends phenomenological and experimental approaches with research into optics, architecture, history, and metaphysics. Through visceral, multi-layered experiences, he explores perception, embodiment, and the intersection of contemporary art, literature, film, and interactive media.
An interactive, dreamlike experience built inside a game engine, Benign Land takes viewers on a metaphysical journey through Ireland’s subconscious past, from pagan times to the Troubles of Northern Ireland. For Matters of Being, the artist will perform the experience live, guiding the audience through its evocative, symbolic landscapes.
About the curator
Nele Brökelmann is an artist deeply intrigued by the human need for structures of meaning. The perpetual search for and fabrication of meaning are recurring themes in her practice. These human made structures, and mental and worldly concepts create (physical) borders and either/or thinking which Brökelmann continuously seeks to challenge by playing with the experiences and concepts of distance, repetition and parallelity. Apart from her artistic practice and curating Matters of Being, Brökelmann writes for the contemporary art magazine Metropolis M.
Presented by iii and Filmhuis Den Haag with financial support from Creative Industries Fund NL and The Municipality of The Hague.
