to Faro however, in The First Day of Spring the protagonists are being placed centre stage as Islam puts it: One is more used to looking at their necks than at their faces1. The intense visual gratification of the footage is thematised, not avoided, and while there is no narrative as such, the way Islam positioned and filmed her subjects makes for a highly stylised, seemingly rehearsed and fictional whole.Runa Islam makes film and video installations that use overlapping layers of narrative to explore notions of truth and fiction, subjectivity and authorship. Islam installs her films in architectural configurations, frequently presenting them across two or three screens as a framing device. Her work aims to blur the distinctions between film and sculpture, art and cinema, and encourages a range of interpretations from viewers.Early works often emerged from her interest in well-known passages of avant-garde film. Tuin (1998), for example, recreates a moment from Rainer Werner Fassbinders film Martha (1973) and in Scale 1/16 inch = 1 foot (2003), the artist re-stages the film in the 1960s Brutalist car park featured in the cult film Get Carter (1971). In more recent work, Islam often takes a single visual motif as her point of departure, such as a woman distractedly spinning a ring in Dead Time (2000), a girl turning towards the camera and then vanishing in Turn (Gaze of Orpheus) (1998), a group of rickshaw drivers instructed by the artist to sit and do nothing in First Day of Spring (2005), or a cable car receding from its port in Time Lines (2005). From these initial images, she intertwines a range of visual and conceptual languages, combining analytical and experimental sequences to create beguilingly open-ended works. In her most recent work, Conditional Probability (2006), Islam has worked with an inner city school, recruiting the pupils to act in a series of interrelated mise-en-scenes.Runa Islam was born in 1970 in Dhaka, Bangladesh. She lives and works in London, UK. She has participated in many group exhibitions, including The Venice Biennale (2005), More than This! Negotiating Realities, Goterborg International Biennale for Contemporary Art (2005) and 8th International Istanbul Biennial (2003). Solo exhibitions include UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2005), Dunkers Kulturhus, Helsingborg (2005), Camden Arts Centre, London (2005), Centre dArt Santa Monica, Barcelona (2005) and MIT List Visual Arts Centre, Cambridge, Massachussetts (2003). http://probash-bangla.com/images/pg7_img3.pdfRuna Islam was Born in Dhaka in Bangladesh in 1970 and lives and works in London. She studied at Middlesex University, followed by a studio residency at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam. Islam has taken the nature of film as her principal subject, examining its narrative structure and its relationship to reality. Her film installations and short single screen works recreate cinematic moments of enchantment and disclose the artificial, constructed nature of filmmaking itself.All of the Islams works is referential, in the sense that it has developed out of the artists love of film as well as her critical interest in the methods of filmmaking itself. Fassbinder, Godard and Antonioni provide the horizon against which she creates her aesthetic that feels saturated with