My Garden's Boundaries Are the Horizon: The Garden (1990) + Forged Yearnings (2025)

For this second film screening at Filmtheater Kriterion in the context of the exhibition My Garden's Boundaries Are the Horizon, we explore unexpected relationships like the ones between the Qajar princesses and Derek Jarman’s Prospect Cottage garden. This is done with the screening of a new video work, Forged Yearnings, by artist Kasra Jalilipour followed by the film The Garden by Derek Jarman.

The Garden contains minimal dialogue, presenting an assemblage of images that unfold as a deeply personal reflection by Jarman, shaped by his confrontation with his own mortality. Created while he was HIV-positive and facing the inevitability of death from AIDS, it includes scenes set at Prospect Cottage and incorporates powerful religious imagery. The narrative centres on a seemingly loving and innocent homosexual couple whose idyllic life is tragically disrupted when they are arrested, humiliated, tortured, and ultimately killed. The film has been interpreted as a testament to the suffering caused by the AIDS crisis and society’s reaction to those who were dying.

In Forged Yearnings, 19th century photographs of Iranian Qajar women lie amongst the plants and sculptures of Derek Jarman’s garden, creating surreal scenarios of women from the past in a foreign land. These photographs are some of the only visual historical evidence of a primarily homosocial country which afforded women many spaces of togetherness. They have been kept in many western archives and have become a subject of fascination for the western gaze, as well as the queer Iranian diaspora, often yearning to find traces of queerness in their history. The film questions the concept of ‘queering the past’, and issues that arise when looking for ourselves in history.

About My Garden's Boundaries Are the Horizon
To See the Inability to See — a collective that formed at de Appel’s Archive in 2019 consisting of Arefeh Riahi, Martín La Roche Contreras and Maartje Fliervoet — developed a foldable multidirectional book/object called My Garden’s Boundaries Are the Horizon: A Porous Reader to Unguard the Garden. The publication has sculptural and performative qualities, stressing the relationship between bodies and books; provoking collectivity in writing, reading and thinking. The book/object has now unfolded into this exhibition — a repertoire of objects, gestures and events that expands its content into the space and in relation to other bodies, such as those of readers, visitors and artworks. This unfolding takes place on a flexible sculpture display that also holds a selection of works, weaving the publication, the artworks and the artefacts into an inter-related constellation of physical and spatial experiences.