Hân Phạm
Once Upon a Time, 2020
digital video, 5 m

Luis Andrés Serrano
Homebody, 2024
digital video, 9 m

Adam Garnet Jones
Demonstration of indianness #31,  2006
digital video, 3 m 30 s

From 11 August to 3 September 2025, the Belkin’s outdoor screen will show On Home and Haunting daily between 9 am and 9 pm, a selection of films curated by Ogheneofegor (Fegor) Obuwoma. Join Obuwoma and filmmakers Hân Phạm and Luis Andrés Serrano on Thursday, 14 August 2025 at 6 pm for a conversation about their work.

On Home and Haunting is a film program on the Belkin outdoor screen that deals with the uncertainty of memory as a mode by which the artists conceive and construct their films. Using the language of “hauntology” (which deals with the ways social, cultural and political issues from the past haunt the present) and how it connects us to the unresolved state of capitalist violence across time and embedded into history, this program highlights three artists working within this realm of the indelible: Hân Phạm, Adam Garnet Jones and Luis Andrés Serrano. Aesthetically, the works of these artists are ghostly; they inhabit places of the past, only possible from the present. Film is a medium favourable for these hauntings. Formally, it allows that which is abstract and ambiguous to take shape in tangible ways and in many cases; a haunting can be political. “A Glossary of Hauntings” by Eve Tuck and C. Ree defines haunting as “the relentless remembering and reminding that will not be appeased by settler society’s assurances of innocence and reconciliation.” This definition asks us to expand our formal understanding of hauntings and what they tell us about life lived and the histories we emerge from.

The film Once Upon a Time (2020) by Hân Phạm deals with the ghosts of war and nostalgia in Sài Gòn, Vietnam, framing a time lived in the wake of atrocity and how that shapes daily life, memory and childhood. The film is established in the filmmaker’s bedroom, allowing for a space of nostalgia and apprehension as it connects popular entertainment to videos of the Vietnam War, asserting the home as an intimate place to understand the trepidations of history and time. Demonstration of Indianness #31 (2006) by Adam Garnet Jones, uses the filmmaker’s grandfather’s home videos from the 1950s to deal with the potential of the archive as a mode for gesturing toward erasure, and the ongoing tension settler colonization in Canada upholds. Thinking through documentation and anthropology, the halting or haunting in time in Jones’s film acts as a reluctant invitation and disruption of an anthropological gaze. Homebody (2024) by Luis Andrés Serrano brings us to an examination of the home, the site of classic haunting. The film begins in Serrano’s childhood home, through a distance created by a mix of visual fissures, petri dishes and personal family photos. These images are collaged on screen and projected through rooms in their home to balance the intimacy of the personal and an almost reverent privacy of the space of the home. The film addresses the artist’s childhood home in a neighbourhood undergoing threats of redevelopment.

These films operate at a point of friction in which the histories the filmmakers emerge from become a tangible and alterable moment in the present through which their stories are held and revisited. The lines of past and future become blurred as the films bring images to the present that challenge the fixity of the past. The films engage an expansive notion of the archive by using personal and collective histories through Google Maps, home videos, found footage, travelogues and family photographs. As their works depart from the space of home, we can question what radical thoughts the domestic might offer as a position from which to engage with the past. The hauntings the films enact by defying space and time are critical of the multiple instances of violence experienced—eviction, war, colonialism. The ambiguity that takes shape as blurred and jumbled images might be the moment of the turning, of the embodied ghostliness that is to come, or rather, that which is already enacted. Thinking about the multiple applications of the archive through which personal history might take form, this program highlights three films that inquire into the possibilities of intervening in archives and the power that a haunting might enact.

Adam Garnet Jones, Demonstration of Indianness #31 (still), 2006. Courtesy of Vtape.

Hân Phạm, Once Upon a Time (still), 2020. Courtesy of the Artist.

Luis Andrés Serrano, Homebody (still), 2024. Courtesy of the Artist.

IMAGE (ABOVE): Luis Andrés Serrano, Homebody (still), 2024. Courtesy of the Artist.