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Nothing Looks The Same At Night

A nod to WHAM!'s ‘Nothing Looks The Same in The Light’, the film's title speaks to the artist's fascination with the hours after-dark and how this time of day gives us the place to explore our secret selves—an unfiltered, unapologetic state that the video echoes in its intertwined depictions of man's impact on Earth and male/female coexistence.

‘Nothing Looks The Same at Night’'s first part features Ziggy Ama Idir Iman—a figure who has held a month-long conversation with Rashid about the film's themes via voice notes across timezones and borders before ever meeting. Idir Iman is the subject we see and the voice we hear, while apocalyptic visions of burning landscapes, bushes, houses, populate the adjacent frame. Idir Iman's appearance embodies the spirit of Shakti and Yin/yang, the harmonious coexistence of male and female energies defined by Rashid as essential to reaching a divine state individually and collectively as man- kind.

A visual intermezzo to Idir Iman's performance, is a clip from the film I Shot Andy Warhol, based on the true story of 1960s radical feminist Valerie Solanas whose S.C.U.M Manifesto was a major piece of Rashid's research whilst making the work. In it, Solanas elaborates on her theory to eliminate the male sex in an effort to better so- ciety. Such disquieting statements are relieved by a suave soul composition, while the imagery of forest fires resumes, and Idir Iman starts dancing.

‘Nothing Looks The Same at Night’ is a journey of contrasts, in which what you see is mitigated by what you hear, and vice-versa. The fire looks like it is dancing whereas the moving body of Idir Iman looks like it is on fire. A journey that ends with Bob Marley's words on struggle and survival. Nothing Looks The Same at Night is a non-linear moving image work, consisting of multiple parts to be experienced on loop.