In Jaki Irvine’s installation The Hottest Sun, The Darkest Hour, five short 16 mm black-and-white films (all 1998–99) were projected simultaneously on different walls of the irregularly shaped gallery space. Disarmingly subtitled “A Romance,” the installation punctuated the dark with the pale and languid glow of a series of romantic engagements and disengagements. Exploring the nature of intimacy, the play of memory and fantasy, and the seductions and estrangements of language—especially “foreign” language and language difference—these films were developed over the past two years by the London-based