Malena Szlam
2021Szlam is the recipient of the Liaison of Independent Filmmakers of Toronto’s (LIFT) Roberto Ariganello Artist Residency Award (2018). Past collaborations include Jerusalem In My Heart (2011-2013), a live audio-visual performance project with Montreal-based musician Radwan Ghazi Moumneh that toured Europe, Canada, and Lebanon; and Breaking the Frame (2012), Marielle Nitoslawska’s feature-length profile of Carolee Schneemann, pioneer of feminist performance art and avant-garde cinema.
She is a member of Double Negative, an artist collective dedicated to the production and exhibition of experimental cinema.
Beneath Your Skin of Deep Hollow
Malena Szlam
Beneath Your Skin of Deep Hollow translates night and water into arrhythmic movements of light in a fugue of colours. Shifting impressions emerge on the surface of an agitated stillness, while darkness illuminates reflections and sight.
Beneath Your Skin of Deep Hollow
Altiplano
Malena Szlam
Filmed in the Andean Mountains in the traditional lands of the Atacameño, Aymara, and Calchaquí-Diaguita in Northern Chile and Northwest Argentina, ALTIPLANO takes place within a geological universe of ancestral salt flats, volcanic deserts, and coloured lakes. Fusing earth with sky, day with night, heartbeat with mountain, and mineral with iridescent cloud, ALTIPLANO reveals a vibrating landscape in which a bright blue sun threatens to eclipse a blood-red moon.
Altiplano
Cronograma de un tiempo inexistente
Malena Szlam
Chronogram is a photomontage that explores stillness, motion, and memory. Using a 35mm still camera, multiple exposures were composed and edited in-camera, creating frameless sequences of images printed on 35mm filmstrips. When projected, these images become a non-linear, non-synchronized collage. The ephemeral quality of the images—their transparency, layering, and repetition—invites us to reflect on the role memory plays in perception, the ways we mentally reconfigure fragments to construct stability and meaning in an environment of perpetual flux.
Chronogram of Inexistent Time
Morfología de un sueño
Malena Szlam
Morphology of a Dream is a visual study of the rhythms of sleep cycles during the phase of rapid eye movement. Filmed in the forest in Colorado, Morfología explores an oneiric world that expresses place and memory in a fleeting succession of colors and sensations hovering between the “real” and abstract worlds.
Morphology of a Dream
