2K film and sound. Duration: 9 minutes and 43 seconds. Public Figure is a collaboration between artist and filmmaker Madalia Zaharia and poet and performer Ryan Ormonde

‘Public Figure’ is a lyrical account of a body in space, a metrical composition in which poet Ryan Ormonde is carefully observed and reimagined by Zaharia’s cinematic eye. Through this exchange, the poet and the onlooker are collectively staging a particular sense of ‘publicness’, a certain type of relationship that relies heavily on the tension between the body and the voice, and has its source in practices of embodied poetry and writing. The film is guided by the changing and wavering voice of the poet, a voice completely independent from the body and at the same time in restless search for a physical host, following its presence around the fictitious and dreamlike set of Ormonde’s domestic interior.

‘Do I dance how you expect? The filmed body is captured in tension with the disembodied voice in voice-over. Moments of lip-synch simultaneously bridge and expose the schism. Queerness is delineated through its oppositions. Oranges will fall.

Madalina Zaharia & Ryan Ormonde, Public Figure, 2021, 2K film and sound. Duration: 9 minutes and 43 seconds. Public Figure is a collaboration between artist and filmmaker Madalia Zaharia and poet and performer Ryan Ormonde

Madalina Zaharia & Ryan Ormonde, Public Figure, 2021, 2K film and sound. Duration: 9 minutes and 43 seconds. Public Figure is a collaboration between artist and filmmaker Madalia Zaharia and poet and performer Ryan Ormonde

Madalina Zaharia & Ryan Ormonde, Public Figure, 2021, 2K film and sound. Duration: 9 minutes and 43 seconds. Public Figure is a collaboration between artist and filmmaker Madalia Zaharia and poet and performer Ryan Ormonde

Madalina Zaharia & Ryan Ormonde, Public Figure, 2021, 2K film and sound. Duration: 9 minutes and 43 seconds. Public Figure is a collaboration between artist and filmmaker Madalia Zaharia and poet and performer Ryan Ormonde

Madalina Zaharia & Ryan Ormonde, Public Figure, 2021, 2K film and sound. Duration: 9 minutes and 43 seconds. Public Figure is a collaboration between artist and filmmaker Madalia Zaharia and poet and performer Ryan Ormonde

FILM CREDITS

Director & Producer Madalina Zaharia

Writer & Performer Ryan Ormonde

Director of Photography Emma Dalesman

Music & Sound Design Joshua Fay

Voice Ryan Ormonde

Choreography Daniel Hay-Gordon

Costumes and Set Design Thom Shaw

Focus Puller Christopher J. Orr

Gaffer Sabrina Corda

Colourist Jason R Moffat

Voiceover recording Chris Smith (Kluster Sounds, London)

Madalina Zaharia (b.1985, Sighetu Marmatiei, Romania) is a Romanian artist who lives in London. Recent exhibitions include: VIDEO+RADIO+LIVE (co-lateral event of the Art Encounters Biennial 2021), Casa Artelor, Timisoara; So Far So Good, Budapest Gallery, Budapest; Viral self-portraits, Moderna galerija (MG+MSUM), Ljubljana; Art Encounters Biennial 2019 (curated by Maria Lind and Anca Rujoiu), Timisoara; Reading as Rhythm: A Sonic Exploration of the Visual Vocabulary of Control Magazine, Tate Exchange Liverpool (2018); DEBT., Tintype Gallery (solo), London (2017); Identify Your Limitations, Acknowledge The Periphery, Vitrine Gallery, London (2016); The Staging of an Exhibition, Ivan Gallery (solo), Bucharest (2016); London Open 2015, Whitechapel Gallery, London.

Ryan Ormonde (b. 1981, South London, UK) is a poet from London and co-founder of performance collective press free press. Ryan’s second poetry pamphlet, a meditation on the effect of the medium of film on the written word, was described by Rosie Breese in Sabotage Reviews as ‘wonderfully unpredictable; a wild ride through the poet’s wordplayworld and the questioning of meaning itself’. In the last year, Ryan has contributed poems to SPAM, Spoonfeed, Osmosis and Permeable Barrier, collaborated on a video poem with poet Karenjit Sandhu for Magma and produced the zine-length poem ‘Ray’s Marble Race’. Ryan is a contributing artist to Impermanence Dance’s Decade project.

Cristina Ramos (b.1989, Asturias, Spain) is an curator and writer based in Palma, Mallorca. She co-founded the exhibition platforms Window Space and The LivingRoom in London, the Arnis Residency in a small village of Germany, and is member of the project space +DEDE in Berlin. Drawing from affective and cognitive understandings of our surroundings, her practice considers site-specificity as an intrinsic quality of curation. Her current research is informed by processes of the rural, the materiality of water, the female gaze and the performance in objects. Recent exhibitions include Marine Aspirations, TACA, Palma de Mallorca (2021); Being pulled all over the place, Scan Projects, London (2020); The inhalation of an oceanic carbon breadth, Etopia Centre for Art and Technology, Zaragoza (2019) and This shall be for a bond in between us, ArtNight, London (2019).