Alberta Whittle ‘RESET’

RESET was co-commissioned and produced by Frieze and Forma as the Frieze Artist Award 2020. Alberta produced RESET at the height of lockdown, filming across Scotland (at Jupiter Artland and her home-town Glasgow), South Africa and Barbados and responding to the immediate context of the Black Lives Matter movement, the global pandemic and climate emergency. The moving-image work is informed by the writings of queer theorist, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, interweaving gothic imagery, fears of contagion, xenophobia and the ensuing moral panic that often follows such anxieties. Exploring timely questions relating to personal healing and the cultivation of hope in hostile environments such as the ensuing global pandemic, colonialism or xenophobia, this urgent political film there are moments of grief and reflection, but also empathy and desire.