Prophetic Video Art from Beloufa, Phillipson and Zaman Gains Relevance During Pandemic

Neïl Beloufa's 2014 interactive series 'Screen Talk' satirizes a hallucination-inducing pandemic through a website where viewers navigate glitchy story-paths and solve meme-like puzzles. The work features incompetent virologists and statisticians pontificating about saving the world with gibberish equations. Heather Phillipson's 2016 video 'TRUE TO SIZE' explores millennial panic against ecological crisis and digital capitalism, memorializing cultural exhaustion through intense two-minute monologues available on her Vimeo channel. Rehana Zaman's 2018 film 'Lourdes' follows a market trader in Tepito, Mexico, who discusses feminist politics and albures speech culture while asserting women's community power. These video works, created before COVID-19 lockdowns, have gained new resonance as galleries moved presentations online during venue closures. Beloufa's satire specifically addresses social elites in charge during crises, while Phillipson's work appears on the New Museum website and Zaman's film is part of Camden Art Centre's 'F(r)ictions' feminist-focused experimental film strand. The pandemic has created a chasm that makes these pre-2020 works feel both prophetic and melancholic, with artists now facing a blank screen for creating new art in this changed context.