Some Women Other Women and all the Bittermen | Screening & Discussion

About

A screening of artist Rehana Zaman’s film Some Women Other Women and all the Bittermen (2014) within the context of the exhibition Harun Farocki: Consider Labour at Cooper Gallery and as part of the city-wide event Dundee Women's Festival. The screening will be followed by a discussion between artist Rehana Zaman and Marissa Begonia a Founding Member and Director of The Voice of Domestic Workers.

Some Women Other Women and all the Bittermen combines ‘Bittermen’, a six-part fictional soap opera on the takeover of Tetley’s Brewery during the early 1990s, with footage documenting the meetings of Justice for Domestic Workers Leeds over the course of 2014 as they began to organise around restrictions to their employment rights within UK immigration laws. The film developed over a two-year period involving research interviews with ex Tetley’s Brewery workers and a tentative collaboration with migrant women workers from J4DW (currently The Voices of Domestic Workers). Although at a temporal, political, and cultural remove from one another the stories of these two groups are framed by common concerns relating to sites of labour and working class identity as framed through gender and race.

Schedule

Doors open: 6.15pm

Intro & Screening: 6.30pm – 7.30pm
Some Women Other Women and all the Bittermen (45mins)

Conversation: 7.30–8.30pm
Rehana Zaman and Marissa Begonia

Booking

The screening event is free and open to all. Book a ticket via Eventbrite. 

Biographies

Marissa Begonia is a Founding Member and Director of The Voice of Domestic Workers. The Voice of Domestic Workers (formerly known as Justice For Domestic Workers) is an education and support group calling for justice, rights and welfare for Britain’s sixteen thousand migrant domestic workers. They provide educational and community activities for domestic workers - including English language lessons, drama and art classes, and employment advice, and provide support for domestic workers who exit from abusive employers. and empower migrant domestic workers to stand up and voice their opposition to any discrimination, inequality, slavery and all forms of abuse. 

She is a Unite the Union Representative for Migrant Domestic Workers, the biggest Trade Union in the UK and is in the process of forming the Domestic Workers Branch in Unite.

Rehana Zaman (b. Heckmondwike) is an artist based in London. Her work speaks to notions of kinship and sociality, seeking out possibilities of intimacy and transgression within hostile contexts. Conversation and cooperative methods sit at the heart of her films which extend into texts, performances and group work.

She has exhibited widely in the UK and Internationally. Recent presentations include Serpentine Projects (forthcoming), BEK - Bergen Centre for Electronic Arts, British Art Show 9 (Touring), ICA Miami, Trinity Square Video, Toronto, Borås International Sculpture Biennial (Sweden), Artist Film International Whitechapel, London and worldwide. In 2019 she co-edited Tongues with Taylor Le Melle, published by PSS and was shortlisted for the Film London Jarman Award. She is a member of not/nowhere artist workers cooperative and her films are distributed by LUX.

Image credit

Rehana Zaman, Some Women Other Women and all the Bittermen, 2014. Courtesy the artist and LUX.