TEETH addresses the entanglement of love, power, and administration in the UK spousal visa process. In January 2017, former Home Secretary Amber Rudd wrote, ‘illegal and would-be illegal migrants and the public…need to know that our immigration system has “teeth”‘. Her letter, written to then Prime Minister Theresa May, was leaked in April 2018 amid reporting on the Windrush Scandal. Teeth are the bite of the UK immigration system, its violence and desirous devouring.

In TEETH the Home Office sites operate not only as interrogative spaces but theatrical spaces akin to the stage and the audition room. These sites function to produce and evaluate belonging, borders, and national identity through the framework of immigration and intimate bonds. The fictional interview in TEETH is not a carbon copy of the experience. The interview practices are primarily based in reality—the communication evidence being a requirement for spousal visa applications—but the staging strives to convey the emotional reality.

Jennifer Martin (1990, USA/UK) is a London based artist filmmaker. Since graduating from the Slade School of Fine Art and Royal College of Art, her films have been screened at festivals including BlackStar, British Shorts Berlin, SOUL Fest, EMAF, Alchemy Film and Moving Image, RIDM, and more. She was awarded the 2018 Stuart Croft Foundation Education Award and selected for the FLAMIN fellowship 2019/20. Martin is a Film London Lodestar 2021 and winner of Best Screenplay at SOUL Fest 2021 for ‘TEETH’. She is a co-director of the black and POC-led artist workers’ cooperative not/nowhere, specialising in analogue film.