Surreal Storytelling: Wael Shawky & Leonora Carrington

Join us for an afternoon film screening of surreal myths and tales, curated by The Hepworth Wakefield’s Curatorial Assistant, Farah Dailami.

There will be a screening of a film by Wael Shawky as well as two film adaptations of Leonora Carrington’s written works: the well-known short story The Debutante (1936), and Inside the Cauldron, based on Carrington’s unpublished essay For Generations.

Tickets include exhibition entry.

Wael Shawky

Film to be announced

Wael Shawky was born in Alexandria in 1971 where he lives and works. Based on extensive periods of research and enquiry, Wael Shawky’s work tackles notions of national, religious and artistic identity through film, performance and storytelling. Whether instructing Bedouin children to act out the construction of an airport runway in the desert or organizing a heavy metal concert in a remote Egyptian village, Shawky frames contemporary culture through the lens of historical tradition and vice versa. Shawky represented Egypt in the 2024 Venice Biennale.

The Debutante, 2022 (1936, 8’)

Elizabeth Hobbs, original text by Leonora Carrington

The Debutante is based on a short story written by the Surrealist artist Leonora Carrington, who was presented at the court of King George V and herself became a debutante in 1936. Elizabeth Hobbs celebrates Carrington’s bold and funny story with paint, collage, and a rostrum camera, accompanied by a score by composer Hutch Demouilpied. In The Debutante, a spirited young woman persuades a hyena from London Zoo to take her place at a coming-out ball being held in her honour. Produced by Animate Projects.

Inside the Cauldron, (2023, 18’)

India Ayles and Sophie Mei, original text by Leonora Carrington

An ecological essay, titled For Generations, by the pioneering artist Leonora Carrington has recently been discovered. Carrington’s lost message has resurfaced into a world facing the environmental collapse that she feared.  Inspired by her call to action, a group of emerging artists from the UK and Mexico made an experimental film called Inside the Cauldron, produced by The Derek Jarman Lab. Shot inside Carrington’s previously unseen home and studio in Mexico City, the film is a rare insight into her world and work, which celebrates hybridity and the blurring of the boundaries between human and animal. 

In the spirit of Carrington’s multi-disciplinary practice, the filmmakers take a similar approach, interweaving footage of the performance artist Isabel Legate moving through Leonora’s house and studio with a voiceover of Carrington’s essay read by her friend, the writer Dame Marina Warner. Inside the Cauldron is an intergenerational plea for humans to see themselves as organisms within the natural world, not separate from it.