The practices of artist filmmaker Miranda Pennell are embedded in different forms of critical archival practice. She has produced a body of award-winning film and video work that explores forms of collective performance, whether dancers, soldiers or musicians. Her most recent moving-image works use colonial archives as the starting point for investigations into the colonial imaginary. Pennell’s focus rests on the history of British aerial bombing in the Middle East and traverses a series of different archives. In Trouble (2023) she looks specifically to RAF air survey photographs of Iraq, Transjordan and Egypt in 1928. These military images were contemporaneously formed into a collection by the British archaeologist Osbert Crawford. Miranda Pennell’s research is like a detective investigation, searching for the clues that have been unwillingly left behind by the very same butchers who have been praised by History as civilizers. In these images of ruins illustrating the imperialist enterprise of knowledge and control, Pennell discovers the scars hidden by the archives; like so many unhealed wounds through which repressed History surges back to challenge the official narrative. Through these cracks, the victims of British (and European) colonisation rise from the dead to seek revenge; forever invisible, they manifest themselves through the sound of 1950’s and 1960’s horror films. By mixing the essay form with genre films, Pennell creates a horror story that is terribly real. The film forces us to stare into the darkness of History and to hold the gaze it reflects back. 

Her video essay Strange Object (2020) takes, in her words, “aerial photographs of an undisclosed colonised territory as the starting point for a meditation on images, erasure and the writing of history”. In her longest film to date, The Host (2016), while investigating her late parents’ involvement with the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (now BP), the filmmaker comes across the letters of a petroleum geologist in Iran in the 1930s, who would later embark on a search for the origins of ‘civilisation’. The film sets out on its own exploration, to decipher signs from the fragmented images buried in the BP archive. This journey through images of the past interweaves stories drawn from both personal memory and from the records of an imperial history, and gradually builds a picture of a 20th century colonial encounter.