Jyoti Mistry

Keynote with Jyoti Mistry
Film Screening Loving in Between and Discussion

Chair: Doris Posch

Passionate Solidarities: From Queer Futurity to Transformative Recognition

Inspired by the possibilities of the “not-yet-here” conceived in queer futurity (José Esteban Muñoz, 2009) this presentation coupled with a screening of Loving In Between (Jyoti Mistry, 2023) seeks to return to the expanded ideas of queer politics. Queer in its connection to passion is neither regulation nor obsession that thwarts political transformation but a quest for worldmaking through collective solidarities. The presentation focuses on the possibilities of new cultural forms and subjectivities conceivable through a politics of recognition, from intimate relationships to political, cultural and legal spheres with the vision to facilitate societal transformation. What is the role of the researcher, scholar and artist in making the world to come? What are the political, environmental and cultural means through which these possibilities may be achieved? Can queer futurity be a politics for transforming recognition through passion, for a shared vision of humanity that exceeds our current condition?

Jyoti Mistry (PhD) is Professor in Film at HDK-Valand at University of Gothenburg. She works with film as a research form and mode of artistic practice. She has made critically acclaimed films in multiple genres, and her installation work draws from cinematic traditions but is often re-contextualized for galleries and museums that are outside of the linear cinematic experience. Most recent: Loving in Between(2023) premiered at Locarno International Film Festival and Cause of Death (2020) premiered at Berlinale International Film Festival. Her current research focus is on indigenous Sámi schools in Sweden’s colonial history. Recent publications: International Journal of Film and Media Arts: Transversal Entanglement - Artistic Research in Film (2022) and a special issue of Film Education Journal Decolonising Film Education(June 2022). From 2021-2024 she was editor-in-chief of PARSE (Platform of Artistic Research in Sweden). In 2016, she received the Cilect Teaching Award for innovation in film research and pedagogy and in 2022 was awarded Sweden’s FilmForm prize. She has supervised numerous creative arts PhDs at HDK-Valand and the Wits School of Arts, University of Witwatersrand in South Africa. From August 2024 to September 2025, Mistry is Leverhulme Visiting Professor at SOAS (University of London).

Loving in Between
by Jyoti Mistry, Austria/South Africa, 2023, 18 min.

Loving In Between is inspired by the poem Advice by Langston Huhges: “Folks, I’m telling you, birthing is hard and dying is mean – so get yourself a little loving in between.”

Between birth and death, is the power to love and live. Political rules, religious orders, social norms and cultural taboos control who we love and how we love. The right to love, is controlled and regulated by how we live. But the erotic has the power to emancipate. With spoken word and archive sources, love is unboxed from categories in queer expression and a celebration of eros as the power to change our attitudes to life and to allow others to live their lives without judgment or prejudice.

After When I Grow up I Want to be a Black Man (2017) and Cause of Death (2020), Loving In Between is Jyoti Mistry´s last part of her archival trilogy on race, sex and gender. She brings back her collaborators of the two previous films, spoken word artists Kgafela oa Magagodi and Napo Masheane and creates through archival film footage, animation and poetry a visual experimental stream of consciousness.Following the work of Kara Keeling, we can read Jyoti Mistry’s trilogy conclusion as recordings of queer times (past) that use new media and technology to create an exploration of “queer times, Black futures.” In doing so, it opens revitalized futures in which previously unthinkable imaginations can be conjured up.