Please note, ‘The Great Curdling’ screens every 30 minutes. A subtitled version plays at half-past each hour.
Two Queens is proud to present a screening exhibition of ‘The Great Curdling’ by Jennet Thomas.
The Great Curdling is a Folk-Sci-Fi film. It’s a darkly comic Musical exploring the feeling that collective reality is at tipping point. A middle-class family are adjusting to a new kind of happy, now they have consumed a transformative liquid technology that helps re-structure them from the inside. The father is interrogated by an Alexa-like voice and his answers build a picture of a world where ‘animals ended’ but mourning them is taboo. Meanwhile, on the shores of a strangely altered sea, two outcast women meet accidentally when they are attacked by autonomous flying packages. They sing about the Curdlings – some unspeakable intermingling of bio-tech horror and Fascism. Although the sea is dying, it’s spawning something that could be new life – fantastical creatures that are half-cartoon, and take the form of tiny flexing hands. A funeral cult has formed, worshiping this new phenomena. They are teaching the exiled women how to re-format the colonized, curdled bodies of the dead into a new substance.
The Great Curdling is the final part in the series ANIMAL CONDENSED>ANIMAL EXPANDED, which takes the form of 4 interrelated videos exploring, through fantasy, the conflicted and curdled relationships humans have with other forms of life. The work collides a number of genres: Folk Sci-Fi, musical, mock-documentary, absurdist satire and uses an unusual mix of digital/physical effects to invoke the forces of technology on lived experience.
Jennet Thomas makes films, performances and installations. She creates absurdist worlds that confound straightforward readings, in the form of sci-fi folk tales, musicals and unreliable lectures. She mines the connections between fantasy, ideology and the everyday with a DIY, absurdist spirit – a kind of resistance to capitalist aesthetics. Her work frequently explores how humans deal with intimations of impending doom. Using a collision of genres, her work can look like experimental film, children’s drama, T.V. news, or performance art and hopes to be as entertaining as it is unsettling. Her longer-form film works involve characters with elaborate costumes and props in scenarios that are clearly outlandish, yet resonate with multiple layers of meaning. The found object and the constraints of rhyme are important mechanisms in her practice, particularly in the way in which unexpected meanings are generated.
This project is made possible by public funding from The National Lottery through Arts Council England.
