Tender Living AMI Club is a new artists’ moving-image screening programme that foregrounds worldbuilding and highlights the vital plurality of Trans and non-binary perspectives in the UK’s contemporary moving image practice.
The programme will premiere newly commissioned short films by Juliet Jacques, Campbell X and Maz Murray, alongside works by Ames Pennington and Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley. Screenings will take place bimonthly at Studio Voltaire from January 2027.
The film programme showcases a diverse array of cinematic languages, from archival excavations to surreal road trips. The works cover subject matter as diverse as the collapse of the Soviet Union, Irish folklore, the global impact of indigo production, Black Trans histories and Top surgery, whilst experimental techniques further expand the programme’s formal boundaries.
Juliet Jacques' new film, The Lives and Deaths of Remarkable Monroes, 2026, blends original and archival footage to reanimate the complex life of queer Russian artist Vladislav Mamyshev-Monroe (b. 1969–d. 2013), whose name was borrowed from his muse, Marilyn Monroe. A central figure in the generation of artists who came to prominence in 1980s Leningrad, Mamyshev-Monroe became known for photographs, videos and performances in which they took on the guise of historical figures and personalities, including the Pope, Napoleon and Elizabeth Taylor. Jacques’ film traces Mamyshev-Monroe’s life as a dedicated mythmaker, whose complex friendships with fellow artists unfold as together they navigate the shifting realities of a new and ‘free’ Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. The film explores the instability of truth, questioning who constructs ‘reality’ and what happens when it escapes our control.
Maz Murray’s new work, When the devil comes to you, he comes wearing tabis, 2027, follows a queer couple who escape their asbestos-ridden house share for a surreal road trip to the west of Ireland, where they encounter the devil at a dancehall. Utilising satire and the absurd, Murray’s new film draws on family history, whilst foregrounding DIY cinema techniques ranging from spy cams to night vision, and features an original score by Glasgow-based composer and artist Rubie. When the devil comes to you, he comes wearing tabis is co-commissioned by HOME, Manchester.
Campbell X’s powerful new short, Indigo, 2027, is a poetic meditation on Indigo as a symbol of transcendence and transformation. His works explore queer memory and desires erased by colonisation. The film traces Indigo dye's history, from the brutal extraction of labour during the Transatlantic Slave Trade to the Industrial Revolution and colonialism, alongside its protective spiritual role in African Indigenous religious practices. Indigo utilises an original script by Campbell X, combined with found and original footage, to explore aesthetics and thematics that subvert binary genders and nationalistic borders, echoing the parts of our identities that resist divisive eugenicist labelling.
Ames Pennington’s TOPS, 2024, is a genre-busting mockumentary inspired by the chaotic, brash and clueless style of 1990s British TV. Ames Pennington plays an intrusive TV presenter, who delves into the lives of four individuals who have had Top surgery, in a desperate attempt to make their first Trans friend. The interviewees include a powerlifter and aspiring gay-games Olympian, a housing-officer-cum-actor, an Essex filmmaker, and an Equality, Diversity and Inclusion specialist who occasionally models. They open up their lives, homes and, in one case, a bag of dicks, to the invasive and neurotic, yet lovable Ames Pennington. This vibrant celebration trades clinical detachment for joy and wit, capturing the lived realities of its subjects with an infectious, radical charm.
HOW CAN I CENTRE BLACK TRANS BODIES IN THIS SPACE? is a selection of animated shorts by Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, comprising SEEUSINTOUS, 2021; Unarchived Adventures, 2018; and Resurrection Lands, 2023. Brathwaite-Shirley’s urgent and ongoing work archives Black Trans histories through game environments, intertwining lived experience with fiction to imaginatively retell stories of people they seek to archive. The title of the series is both a quote from SEEUSINTOUS, 2021, and an experiment which questions how institutions can effectively centre Black Trans bodies and perspectives.
Designed as sites for community experience and collaborative exchange, each screening will be accompanied by workshops, directors' introductions, panel discussions, programme notes and social events.
The programme will tour across the UK, with support from arts organisations including FACT Liverpool and Yorkshire Contemporary, Leeds, in 2027–2028.
Tender Living AMI Club is a cornerstone of Tender Living, Studio Voltaire’s national four-year programme of interlinked collaborative projects, commissions, exhibitions, creative research and events. Tender Living works to provide sustainable environments and support structures for gender-diverse practitioners and audiences to thrive. The programme builds on Desperate Living (2020–2022), which explored LGBTQIA+ healthcare through experimental programming and highlighted persistent barriers for the LGBTQIA+ community and the critical underrepresentation of Trans artists within the sector. The programme is supported by Arts Council England and Paul Hamlyn Foundation.
