lux/ica biennial of moving images 2012 programme booklet

24–27M

ay2012

biennialofmovingimages.org.uk

ICA Reader Cover6.indd 1 17/05/2012 11:43

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We are delighted to be collaborating with LUX on the inaugural LUX/ICA Biennial of Moving Images. The ICA has long been a home for Artists’ Moving Image in London, and in this event, we celebrate the many artists who have passed through our doors over the years, as well as those who come to us for the first time in 2012. The Biennial’s cross section of activity – screenings, talks, performances, two schools and a live journal – inhabit the ICA for four days this May, using the building to its fullest potential. It’s an occasion we are very proud of. Most importantly the Biennial is a platform for discussion and debate, bringing together a community of artists, filmmakers and film lovers under one roof here at the ICA. Coinciding with the final weeks of “Remote Control”, our expansive group show charting the influences of television on several generations of art and artists, the Biennial confirms our dedication to Artists’ Moving Image. Throughout the year, our Artists’ Film Club programme of events and screenings profiles the best and most interesting work being made across the globe, as well as the occasional gem from the recent past. We look forward to the Biennial and hope you enjoy the many screenings and events taking place at the ICA.

Gregor Muir, Executive Director, Institute of Contemporary Arts

foreword

LUX ICA reader 14.indd 2 17/05/2012 11:36

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Considering the great tradition of Artists’ Moving Image in the UK, it’s amazing that London has lacked an event celebrating it for so many years. Our hope is that the LUX/ICA Biennial of Moving Images will be that event – a place and time to gather, see, talk and think about all aspects of moving image practice. Despite its ubiquity, moving image’s dispersed and ephemeral nature can often seem to keep it just out of reach; the Biennial is our attempt to create a critical mass which will really give a sense of the state of moving image practice and where it might go next. As with all of LUX’s activities, we aspire to the potential for collective progression – as one of our founders Malcolm Le Grice would describe it, taking ‘ideas from the screen’ and moving forward. We hope the Biennial with its various interactive elements will offer just that opportunity. We have been talking about, and working on, a moving image festival for a long time, including a brief period when it might have taken place in Norwich, and I remain indebted to the artists and organisations there (particularly OUTPOST) for so generously supporting the development of the project. Now back in London, it is fitting that the Biennial finally comes into the world in partnership with the ICA, an organisation which has done much to support Artists’ Moving Image over the years, as well as being the first home of “Pandemonium” (a festival of moving image organised by our predecessor London Electronic Arts in the 1990s) and Little Stabs at Happiness, Mark Webber’s club night where so many people discovered artists’ films in 90s London. We are very happy to be opening the Biennial with its one off return. Finally, I would like to dedicate this first Biennial to a number of artists and friends we have lost in the past year who all contributed so much to Artists’ Film and Video: Breda Beban, Robert Breer, George Kuchar, Owen Land, Mike Kelley, Adolfas Mekas and Robert Nelson, as well as the great writer, programmer and advocate, Amos Vogel. Benjamin Cook, Director, LUX

foreword


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Welcome to the inaugural LUX/ICA Biennial of Moving Images, a four-day celebration of contemporary Artists’ Moving Image launched by LUX and the Institute of Contemporary Arts. From 24–27 May 2012, the ICA is transformed into a hub of moving image activity, featuring a wide range of guest curated screening programmes selected by Thomas Beard & Ed halter (Light Industry), yann Chateigné Tytelman, Michelle Cotton, Elena Filipovic, Shanay Jhaveri, and Martha Kirszenbaum, as well as two programmes selected by moving image artists Rosa Barba and Ben Rivers, and those of two curators selected from a curatorial open call, Carmen Billows and Shama Khanna. At a pivotal time in the development of moving image, as its media dematerialises in the wake of recent digital forms, the Biennial seeks to address contemporary approaches from a position informed by the practice’s rich heritage. As well as offering the opportunity to view a huge number of films, the Biennial also provides a platform for discussion and debate, featuring a high-profile series of chaired panel discussions, presented in association with Film London Artists’ Moving Image Network (FLAMIN), that explores current issues in contemporary Artists’ Moving Image practice, focusing on topics such as ‘Cinema as Art’ and ‘Artists’ Long-form Filmmaking’. Our panel chairs include Bridget Crone, Maeve Connolly, May Adadol Ingawanij, and Stuart Comer. In addition to the talks programme, the students of the LUX/ Central Saint-Martins MRes Art: Moving Image course will co-produce a two-day Student Symposium for UK-based MA and PhD students to present their research ‘On Failure’ and ‘Contemporary Currents’ within Artists’ Moving Image practice, with keynote lectures from Jan Verwoert and Maeve Connolly. A series of evening events kicks off with a revival of Little Stabs at Happiness, the music and film club presented by Mark Webber at the ICA from 1997 to 2000, which launches the Biennial on Thursday 24 May, and

IntroduCtIon


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IntroduCtIon

includes a rare screening of Roberto Rossellini’s The Machine that Kills Bad People (La Macchina ammazzacattivi) (1952) and music from Little Stabs DJs. The following three nights see a series of live events take over the ICA’s Theatre. These performance events are co-produced by Bridget Crone / Plenty Projects in association with Picture This, Electra, and Tramway, and feature expanded cinema screenings and live performances by artists including Claire hooper, Sophie Macpherson & Clare Stephenson, Shelly Nadashi, Gail Pickering, Jimmy Robert, Corin Sworn & Charlotte Prodger, and Cara Tolmie, as well as a collaborative project by Ed Atkins, Gareth Bell-Jones, Gil Leung, and James Richards. Running parallel to the Biennial, a 5-day Artists’ School led by Ian White and a 2-day Curating Artists’ Moving Image Course led by George Clark facilitate discussion and debate through a dynamic programme of seminars and discussions featuring curators and artists contributing to the Biennial, while a Live Journal, produced onsite and edited by Isla Leaver-yap, features commentary, analysis, and up-to-the-minute reportage by writers-in-residence, Amy Budd, Thomas Morgan Evans, and Jonathan P Watts, who were selected from an open call. The LUX/ICA Biennial is the only event of its kind in the UK, and its length and breadth of content is testament to the diversity of Artists’ Moving Image. We hope you enjoy the Biennial.


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Contents

8 Little Stabs at happiness

9 Timetable

12 Screening Programme 52 Performance Programme

59 Live Journal

60 Talks Programme 61 Student Symposium 62 Artists’ School 63 Curating Artists’ Moving Image Course


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A revival of Little Stabs at Happiness, the music and film club presented by Mark Webber at the ICA from 1997 to 2000. Early evening experimental films and contemporary music will be followed by a rare screening of Roberto Rossellini’s The Machine that Kills Bad People (La Macchina ammazzacattivi) (1952). When the credits roll, the volume rises, as original Little Stabs DJs and guests spin disco anthems, new wave big beats and smash hits of yesteryear.

8pm: Quiet Music & Underground Films• Irm & Ed Sommer, Nitsch, 1969, 16mm, 14 min• Tony & Beverly Conrad, Straight and Narrow, 1970, 16mm, 10 min• Manuel De Landa, Incontinence: A Diarrhetic Flow of Mismatches, 1978, 16mm, 18 min

9.30pm: Feature Film• Roberto Rossellini, The Machine that Kills Bad People (La Macchina ammazzacattivi), 1952, 16mm, 83 min

11pm: Music & Dancing• Real songs with a beat you can dance to.

1am: Close

lIttle stAbs At HAppIness lAunCH event

tHursdAy 24 MAy 8pMICA tHeAtre

A Club nIGHt presented by MArk webber

Roberto Rossellini, The Machine that Kills Bad People (La Macchina ammazzacattivi), 1952.


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sCreenInG + Q&A: Curated by Thomas Beard & Ed halter (Light Industry)


Shama Khanna

sCreenInG + Q&A: Curated by Rosa Barba

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Crone / Plenty Projects in association with Picture This

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sCreenInG:Curated by

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Shanay Jhaveri

sCreenInG:Curated by Thomas Beard & Ed halter (Light Industry)

tAlk: Cinema as Art

sCreenInG:Curated by Ben Rivers

tAlk: Theatricality and

Staging

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student syMposIuM:on fAIlure



Michelle Cotton


Carmen Billows


Martha Kirszenbaum


yann Chateigné Tytelman

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Shama Khanna


Michelle Cotton


yann Chateigné Tytelman

tAlk: Artists’ Long-form

Filmmaking

sCreenInG:Curated by Rosa Barba

tAlk: Global Centres

perforMAnCe: Co-produced by

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student syMposIuM:

ConteMpororAry Currents


sCreenInG + Q&A: Curated by Ben Rivers

sCreenInG: Curated by

Martha Kirszenbaum

sCreenInG: Curated by

Carmen Billows


Elena Filipovic

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QuestIons of trAvel

Shanay Jhaveri is a PhD candidate at the Royal College of Art, London. he graduated from Brown University, concentrating on Art Semiotics and the history of Art and Architecture. he is the editor of Outsider Films on India: 1950–1990, and has curated film programmes at Tate Modern, London, INIVA, London and Frieze.

frIdAy 25 MAy, 2pMICA CIneMA 1sAturdAy 26 MAy, 6.30pMICA CIneMA 2

CurAted by sHAnAy JHAverI

sCreenInG proGrAMMe

• Marcel Broodthaers, A Voyage on the North Sea, 1974, 16mm, 4 min• Charles and Ray Eames, Textiles and Ornamental Arts of India, 1955, 16mm, 11 min• Leslie Thornton, Binocular (Black Parrot), 2010, video, 3 min 40 sec• Camille henrot, The Strife of Love in a Dream, 2011, video, 11 min 37 sec• Mark Lapore, The Sleepers, 1989, 16mm, 16 min• Ben Russell, Black and White Trypps Number 2, 2006, 16mm, 9 min• Paul Sharits, Brancusi’s Sculpture Ensemble at Tirgu Jiu, 1984, 16mm, 23 min• Len Lye, Colour Flight, 1938, 16mm, 4 min

Ben Russell, Black and White Trypps Number 2, 2006, 16mm. Courtesy Lightcone and the artist.


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QuestIons of trAvel

Should we have stayed at home and thought of here?Where should we be today?Is it right to be watching strangers in a playin this strangest of theatres?

* * *Oh, must we dream our dreamsand have them, too?And have we room for one more folded sunset, still quite warm?

* * *Continent, city, country, society: the choice is never wide and never free. And here, or there… No. Should we have stayed at home, wherever that may be?

Elizabeth Bishop

The films in this programme are about travel, about going abroad. yet, their images, records of ‘others’, ‘objects’ and ‘things’ cannot be regarded simply as testimonials, plain evidence of existence(s). Not merely presentation that can’t be, it is representation, and representation is performance, the realisations of certain positions and effects. Their subjects are not only what is being documented, but also the orientation of the images themselves, how they are shaped, bent, twisted, contrived, affected, formed. So if taking these films as such, the further possibility is allowed to perchance look to the medium itself, the desires and aspirations attached to it, and how they have invariably grown and multiplied over time.


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The programme shuttles between Charles and Ray Eames’ account of an exhibition that was shaped by a Cold War picture, rendered completely out of still images of objects, to a work whose images range from North Africa to New york’s Chinatown, speaking to the profound deterritorialisation of the late 20th century. This film by Mark Lapore is neither documentarian, lyrical, diaristic nor didactic, but engages all of those methods to produce a dialectic that is both incredibly specific and abstract. The discourse initiated is an insight into, but never a literal or direct illustration, of the place of third world cultures from a period of duelling hegemonic powers to that of global totalisation. All the while, there are interruptions by the mirrored procession of tree branches, the interweaving of a pilgrimage with the production of anti-anxiety medication and the extraction of snake venom, the metaphysical continuum amongst a series of Brancusi sculptures, the kaleidoscoping of a black parrot, and a riot of colour sponsored by Imperial Airways. This cluster of images – personal, sensorial, curious, oblique – of real ‘places’ and real ‘things’ have had many which have come before them, and many which will surely come after. They are part of a loop, an accumulation of images. Ultimately, I am not sure what they all carry forward. From frame to frame, perhaps just themselves, perhaps just memories of a feeling, but for me they are fair and generous companions to have when wandering through all this sameness.

QuestIons of trAvel


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QuestIons of trAvel

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sCreenInG proGrAMMe

• Turbulant Blue, 2006, 16mm, 8 min• Singing Biscotts, 2007, 16mm, 6 min• Inkblot #1, 2007, 16mm, 6 min• After the Garden: Dusty Ricket, 2007, 16mm, 7 min• Inkblot #44: Aqua Woman, 2009–11, 16mm, 5 min• A Patch of Green, 2004–5, 16mm, 8 min• The Mongrel Sister, 2007, 16mm, 7 min• Dipping Sause, 2005, 16mm, 6 min• Shelly Winters, 2010, 16mm, 8 min

nIne fIlMs by lutHer prICe

Thomas Beard is a founder and director of Light Industry, a venue for film and electronic art in Brooklyn. In addition to organising screenings and exhibitions for Artists Space, New york; Gladstone Gallery, New york; the Museum of Modern Art, New york; the New Museum, New york; and Tate Modern, London, he recently co-curated the cinema programme for “Greater New york” (2010) at MoMA PS1, Long Island City and

frIdAy 25 MAy, 6pMICA CIneMA 1sAturdAy 26 MAy, 8.30pM ICA CIneMA 2

CurAted by tHoMAs beArd & ed HAlter


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Known since the 1980s for his Super-8 films and performances, Luther Price has, in recent years, turned to 16mm, assembling new works from discarded prints of old documentaries, instructional films, obscure hollywood features, and other examples of cinematic detritus. Working in his home in the suburbs of Boston, Massachusetts, he re-edits the footage by hand, effaces the image through scraping, buries the films to rot and gather mould, and adds tumultuous visual patterns using coloured inks and permanent markers. For soundtracks, he frequently employs only the brutal electromechanical noise generated by sprocket holes running through the projector’s audio system, or abrades the optical track to introduce a sonic blur. The manual ingenuity of his films produces equally complex emotional effects, suggesting chaotic mental states that lie just below the surface of consciousness. Each reel he creates is thereby a unique object, a kind of sculpture, often altered to such an extent that it seems to struggle through the projector, as if playing out the end of film itself. his is a cinema that ecstatically embraces its death drive, so as to achieve maximum potency. Price has produced over a hundred individual films since he began this new phase of his work less than a decade ago, and the following programme provides a glimpse into the idiosyncratic formal

the film programme for the 2012 Whitney Biennial, New york. Ed halter is a critic and curator living in Brooklyn. he is a founder and director of Light Industry, a venue for film and electronic art, and has organised events at Artists Space, New york; the Flaherty Film Seminar, New york; the Museum of Modern Art, New york; the New Museum, New york; PARTICIPANT INC., New york; and Tate

Modern, London. he has also co-curated the film and video programmes for “Greater New york” (2010) at MoMA PS1, Long Island City and the 2012 Whitney Biennial, New york. his writing has appeared in Artforum, The Believer, Little Joe, Frieze, Mousse, the Village Voice and elsewhere.


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vocabularies he has developed during this time. In Turbulant Blue (2006), he refashions a bit of 16mm editing slug – a 35mm action picture sliced down the middle, an element of the post-production process never meant to be seen – running it through the projector to yield a disorienting flutter reminiscent of analogue video’s vertical roll. For A Patch of Green (2004–5), Price worked from the smaller end of the format spectrum, sandwiching pieces of 8mm film between clear 16mm leader, transforming an innocuous romp of kids and pets into something more fragile and precarious. he created Singing Biscotts (2007), part of his “Biscotts” cycle, from multiple beat-up prints of a 1970s documentary about a nursing home, splicing together the same moments from each copy to create a damaged hymn through imperfect serial repetition. Inkblot #1 (2007), the first of his “Inkblots” or hand-painted films, is a pure abstraction made from black ink on clear film, while a later inkblot, Inkblot #44: Aqua Woman (2009–11), adds a layer of oneiric colour washing over images of women and children. From his “After the Garden” series, Dusty Ricket (2007) reveals new patterns formed on an ethnographic film that Price interred in his backyard to disintegrate; the combination of destruction and new mould-growth causes the film’s human figures to throb in and out of existence. The selection concludes with three films that foreground the generative possibilities of radical re-editing: The Mongrel Sister (2007) deforms a medical melodrama into an hysterical distress signal; Dipping Sause (2005) reconfigures a strange film involving a tube-socked boy punished by a Rube-Goldberg-esque dunking machine; while Shelly Winters (2010) is an imageless film, remade from a social issue documentary with only its soundtrack left intact, in which anonymous voices relate personal stories of abuse and regret.



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Luther Price, Sally’s Mouth, 1999, handmade slide. Collection of the artist. © Luther Price. Courtesy the artist.


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sCreenInG proGrAMMe

• Leslie Thornton, Peggy and Fred in Hell: The Prologue, 1985, 16mm, 19 min 40 sec• Ingrid Wiener, Northwestpassage, 1988, DVD, 10 min• Jordan Lavi Quellman, The Deteriorationists, 2012, hD .mov, 13 min• Liza Bear, Earthglow, 1983, video, 8 min• Ben Rivers, Origin of the Species, 2008, 16mm, 16 min

subConsCIous soCIety

Rosa Barba’s work considers the situations of cinema, whether it be the physical characteristics of celluloid, light, projector and sound, the structures of narrative, or its often improbable people, places or stories. Barba takes a sculptural approach to film, often taking apart its elements to create new mobile objects or directing the camera at objects and landscapes with a particular attention to form. She has had

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CurAted by rosA bArbA

p. 24–25: Ben Rivers, Origin of the Species, 2008, 16mm.Courtesy LUX and the artist.


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subConsCIous soCIety

Subconscious Society features a range of films made between 1985 and 2008 that suggest the existence of different worlds and parallel realities, often beginning in what are familiar settings before reaching out into strange and imagined territories, bringing about notions of the future or of life elsewhere. Each of the five works included uses language in an exploratory manner, reorganising and mixing vocabulary so that words are recognisable, yet their meaning or use is not entirely understood. In Leslie Thornton’s Peggy and Fred in Hell: The Prologue (1985), for example, words are scattered in abstract dialogues, but we pick them up and arrange them in an order that makes sense, more or less. The films also twist the concept of time by suggesting that their subjects exist outside of any particular period or that time is somehow running backwards – it is as if reality is malleable and can be bent in all directions, as in Jordan Lavi Quellman’s The Deteriorationists (2012), or uncannily appearing to have no beginning or end. In their different ways, each of these works somehow searches for origins, as the title of Ben Rivers’ film Origin of the Species (2008) suggests. They are pulling towards something, with a desire to reach the place where everything emerges, and in this struggle, the place becomes more and more uncertain, vulnerable and intense.

solo exhibitions at institutions such as Jeu de Paume, Paris; Kunsthaus Zürich; Marfa Book Company, Texas; Fondazione Galleria Civica – Center of Research on Contemporary Art, Trento; MART Museum, Rovereto; Kunstverein Braunschweig; Tate Modern, Level 2 Gallery, London; Centre d’art de l’ile de Vassivière; and the Center of Contemporary Arts, Tel Aviv. She has participated in group shows at institutions

such as MAXXI Museum, Rome; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid; and the Swiss Institute, New york, as well as numerous biennial exhibitions including the Liverpool Biennial 2010; the 52nd and 53rd Venice Biennale; the 2nd Thessaloniki Biennial of Contemporary Art; and the Biennial of Moving Images, Geneva.


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fetIsH & fIGure

sCreenInG proGrAMMe

• Kenneth Anger, Puce Moment, 1949, 16mm, 7 min• Agnieszka Polska, Plunderer’s Dream, 2011, hD video, 3 min 56 sec• Isabelle Cornaro, Premier rêve d’Oskar Fischinger (Part 1 and Part 2), 2008, 2-channel 16mm transferred to mini dv, 3 min 14 sec• Shana Moulton, The Galactic Pot Healer, 2010, video, 8 min 32 sec• Ulla von Brandenburg, The Objects, 2009, Super-16mm transferred to hD & Blu-ray, 5 min 37 sec• Ursula Mayer, The Lunch in Fur / Le Déjeuner en Fourrure, 2008, 16mm, 7 min 30 sec• The Twilight Zone, episode “The After hours”, 1960, 30 min

Martha Kirszenbaum is an independent curator and writer based in Paris. She graduated from IEP Sciences-Po in Paris and Columbia University in New york. After a long-term internship in the Department of Media and Performance Art at the Museum of Modern Art, New york, she assisted the chief curator of Photography at Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. From 2008 to 2010, she worked as a research assistant at

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CurAted by MArtHA kIrszenbAuM

Ursula Mayer, The Lunch in Fur / Le Déjeuner en Fourrure, 2008, 16mm. Courtesy LUX and the artist.


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fetIsH & fIGure

Fetish & Figure brings together six films and videos by artists and filmmakers that address both the fetishisation of objects and the exclusive relation between the representation of objects and the body. Exploring the theme of tableau vivant, this programme challenges the presence of the human body that disintegrates, allowing objects to come to life on screen as the camera captures them. The proposed works share a common approach in their use of feminine iconography constructed around sophisticated accessories – perfume bottles, enchanting jewellery and shimmering pieces of clothing – while questioning images of voluptuousness and consumption and, finally, reflecting on human solitude, existential melancholy and physical disappearance. A lavishly coloured evocation of hollywood’s mythical era, Kenneth Anger’s Puce Moment (1949) appears to praise boredom and luxury as it crystallises the filmmaker’s feverish obsession with the dream factory. From an oriental ballet of sparkling fabrics to a diva languorously perfuming her body before proudly walking her greyhounds in the sunset of the hollywood hills, Anger captures something properly sublime in the declining yet golden Los Angeles seen in the dazzling narcissism of his only feminine movie through his play with movement, colour and sound. Agnieszka Polska’s animations are visual collages made of images

the New Museum, New york, notably on the exhibitions “The Generational: younger Than Jesus” and “Brion Gysin: The Dreamachine”. As an independent curator, Kirszenbaum has organised exhibitions in New york and Paris. She curated a video programme for the 2011 College Arts Association, New york, and was invited to propose a special project for the 2011 European Culture Congress in Wrocław and, most recently, for the 2012 Marrakech

Biennale. She completed a curatorial residency at the Center for Contemporary Art, Warsaw in 2010, and is currently the guest curator of contemporary art at the Belvedere Museum / 21er haus, Vienna. She regularly contributes to Kaleidoscope, L’Officiel, and Voxpop, and has recently led two seminars on curatorial practices at Université Paris VIII and Parsons Paris.


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found in art magazines and newspapers from the 1960s, which give her videos a subtle documentary aspect. She often revisits Polish modernism through recycling old material and archival photographs into narrative and melancholic animated films, such as the enchanting The Plunderer’s Dream (2011), where a mysterious thief reveals the precious treasures hidden in a household’s everyday objects. In her dual channel installation Premier rêve d’Oskar Fischinger (Part 1 and Part 2) (2008), an homage to the avant-garde animator who famously worked on Walt Disney’s Fantasia (1940), Isabelle Cornaro creates carefully arranged and lit compositions of objects related to cinema on neutral backgrounds that are then filmed on 16mm using both panoramic and close-up shots. her framing and filming strategies distort scale and shift the viewer’s perception of these objects: miniature perfume bottles adopt hieratic, sculptural poses; blown-glass paperweights transform into mysterious, luminous planets. Combining an unsettling, wry humour with a low-tech, Pop sensibility, Shana Moulton creates evocatively oblique narratives in her video and performance works, where she plays a character with surreal interactions with the everyday world. As her protagonist navigates the magical properties of her home decor, Moulton initiates relationships with objects and consumer products that are at once banal and uncanny. In The Galactic Pot Healer (2010), a woman is guided by messages in her medicine cabinet as she seeks to heal her broken ceramic pot. her consumption of new-age objects and redemptive treatments amplifies the fragile economy of her body. Interested in the mechanisms of representation and illusion, Ulla von Brandenburg’s practice is inspired by theatre, science and the psyche. her film The Objects (2009) is a mise en abîme of an enigmatic theatre of objects. Von Brandenburg abandons actors in favour of a procession of props. The camera moves through a looping series of chessboards, flutes,

fetIsH & fIGure


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fans, mirrors and coils of rope, which dance away from us, suspended on pieces of string. As hypnotic and hallucinatory as these animated artefacts seem, the artist always reminds us of backstage mechanics, probing the distance between artistic ideals and lived experience. In her 16mm film The Lunch in Fur / Le Déjeuner en Fourrure (2008), Ursula Mayer stages an imaginary encounter between three female icons of the 1920s. Taking place in a modernist glass house where haunting objects – a tape recorder, a surrealistic chessboard, a fur cover-up – become the characters in an enigmatic play, the film provides the viewer with a mysterious historical flashback. As it addresses the memories of the avant-garde, the dismantled narrative structure of the work conveys ritualised movements, and the subconscious fusion of dream and reality. The programme closes with an episode taken from the American science-fiction TV series The Twilight Zone, entitled “The After hours” (1960). A middle-class American woman gets lost in the apparently inexistent ninth floor of a large department store, and enters the ‘twilight zone’, where bodies and objects are confounded and the fine line between humans and mannequins is crossed. Built around a captivating narrative, this episode investigates a deeper human anguish very present in popular culture of lost identity, living objects and inanimate bodies.

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sCreenInG proGrAMMe

• Bonnie Camplin, Get Me a Mirror, 2004, video, 5 min 58 sec• Spartacus Chetwynd, Call of the Wild, 2007, 16mm, 7 min• George Barber, Schweppes Ad, 1995, video, 4 min• Wim T Schippers, Phil Bloom reading a newspaper on Hoepla, 1967, 1 min 19 sec• Michel Auder, The Games: Olympic Variations, 1984, video, 25 min• Jennifer West, Naked Deep Creek Hot Springs Film (16mm film neg

soaked in lithium hot springs water, Jack Daniels and pot – exposed with flashlights – skinnydipping by Karen Liebowitz, Benjamon Britton & Jwest), 2007, 16mm negative transferred to digital video, 2 min 33 sec

• Shahryar Nashat, One More Time with James, 2009, hD video, 4 min• Anthea hamilton, Venice, 2011, video, 4 min 27 sec

on tHe CustoM of weArInG ClotHes

Michelle Cotton is the Senior Curator at Firstsite, Colchester. She has curated over thirty exhibitions, screenings and projects including solo exhibitions by Michel Auder, Steven Claydon, Paul Sietsema and Stephen Sutcliffe, as well as group exhibitions that include “Camulodunum”, Firstsite, Colchester; “The Long Dark”, International 3, Manchester, hatton Gallery, Newcastle Upon Tyne, and Kettles yard, Cambridge,

and historical surveys of the films of Mary Ellen Bute and the work of the British design group, the Design Research Unit. She has published numerous reviews, essays and articles, and is the author of Design Research Unit 1942–72 and the editor of a new publication on Steven Claydon, Culpable Earth. In 2011, she joined the Acquisitions Committee for the collection at FRAC Champagne-Ardenne, Reims.

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CurAted by MICHelle Cotton


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Writing in the early 1570s, the French essayist Michel de Montaigne ventured:

I believe… that as plants, trees, animals, and all living things are furnished by nature with sufficient covering to protect them from the assaults of the weather, so too were we. But like those who by artificial light put out the light of day, by borrowed means we have destroyed our own… If we were born with the need for petticoats and breeches nature would no doubt have armed with a thicker skin those parts that she exposes to the rigours of the seasons, just as she has done the finger-tips and the soles of the feet… I see a far greater difference between my way of dressing and a peasant’s of my own district than between his and that of a man who wears nothing but his skin.

Titled after and compiled in the spirit of Montaigne’s philosophical essay, On the Custom of Wearing Clothes considers the relationship between convention, necessity and commerce. The programme contains nudity.


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sCreenInG proGrAMMe

• Concerto mécanique pour la folie or La folle mécanomorphose, 1962–63, 16mm transferred to video, 19 min• Images du monde visionnaire (Images of a Visionary World), 1963, 16mm transferred to video, 34 min• Autoportrait d’un schizophrène (Self Portrait of a Schizophrenic), 1977, 16mm transferred to video, 21 min

Inner CIneMA: fIlMs by erIC duvIvIer

yann Chateigné Tytelman is a critic and curator. he is currently Dean of the Visual Arts Department at Geneva University of Art and Design where he supervises LiveInyourhead, the school’s curatorial institute. he previously served as Chief Curator at CAPC Museum of Contemporary Art, Bordeaux. he has curated and co-curated several cross-disciplinary projects, programmes and exhibitions including

“The Curtain of Dreams. hypnagogic Visions”, IAC Villerubanne, 2011–12; “The Mirage of history”, Kaleidoscope Project Space, Milan, LiveInyourhead, Geneva, and Whitechapel, London, 2010–11; “Fun Palace”, Centre Pompidou, Paris, 2010; “IΔO. Explorations in French Psychedelia”, CAPC Museum of Contemporary Art, Bordeaux, 2008; and “A Theater without Theater”, MACBA, Barcelona and Museu Berardo,

sAturdAy 26 MAy, 8pM ICA CIneMA 1sundAy 27 MAy, 8.30pM ICA CIneMA 2

CurAted by yAnn CHAteIGné tytelMAn


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Through a selection of rare films taken from almost 600 productions made by Eric Duvivier in the past 50 years, this programme is an introduction to the universe of a filmmaker who explores the most obscure zones of the human mind – what henri Michaux termed l’espace du dedans (‘the inner space’). Produced and distributed within the context of the pharmaceutical industry and of medical universities, these ‘visual poems’ are also experimental documentaries and political essays, which make us consider, retrospectively, that Duvivier might be one of the most important, yet ignored figures of French cinematic history. The work of Eric Duvivier is as stupefying as it is unknown. Nephew of cineast Julien Duvivier, filmmaker and producer, he was rapidly adopted by the Surrealist Group. In 1967, he directed an adaptation of Max Ernst’s novel La Femme 100 Têtes, which French writer André Pieyre de Mandiargues called ‘the best Surrealist movie seen in the last thirty years or more’. In the meantime, Duvivier collaborated with henri-Georges Clouzot, who asked him to conceive special effects for Inferno (1964). When the producers from Columbia Pictures saw the amazing visual power of the filmmaker’s cinematic experiments, they offered him an ‘open budget’. Though spectacular, this strange film was unfortunately never completed.

Lisbon, 2007–08. he is a regular contributor to Artforum, Frieze, Art in America, Kaleidoscope, Artpress and Criticism.


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In 1963, Eric Duvivier worked together with henri Michaux on one of his cult pieces, Images du monde visionnaire (1963). This film, financed by Sandoz Laboratories (where twenty years earlier, Albert hoffmann famously discovered LSD), is a hallucinatory exploration of the ‘visual images’ produced by the brain under the influence of drugs. The viewer becomes immersed in abstract landscapes and absurd, dreamlike visions: this film remains one of the preeminent examples of psychedelic cinema, even though it was not produced in the context of any artistic or cultural field, but in that of medical documentaries with a clear scientific goal. Concerto mécanique pour la folie (1962), directed in collaboration with Paris-based, Icelandic artist Erró, stages French pop singers Dominique Grange and Jacques higelin in a grandiloquent, theatrical sci-fi film. here, an eccentric visual universe fantasises the nightmare of industrialisation, denounces the social norms of 1960s society, and appears as a visionary cybernetic fable. Always collaborative, the films of Eric Duvivier are often made with a specialist from the medical field. Autoportrait d’un schizophrène (1977) was directed with Pr. D.J. Duché, and the actor and psychedelic filmmaker Pierre Clémenti. The film is both a lyrical attempt to recreate the world perceived by the patient, as well as an abstract and colourful elegy for madness, shot in a grey Paris that had been ruined and hollowed out after May 1968. This film defines Duvivier’s work as an audiovisual poem, holding the possibility for a cinematic representation of the glory of inner revolutions.



35


Eric Duvivier and henri Michaux, Images du monde visionnaire, 1963, 16mm. Courtesy Cerimes, Vanves.


36

sCreenInG proGrAMMe

• Ron Rice, Senseless, 1962, 16mm, 28 min• Robert Nelson, Deep Westurn, 1974, 16mm, 5 min• Laida Lertxundi, Footnotes to a House of Love, 2007, 16mm, 13 min• Ute Aurand, Paulina, 2011, 16mm, 5 min• Ute Aurand, Franz, 2011, 16mm, 5 min• George Kuchar, We, The Normal, 1988, video, 11 min 29 sec• Stephen Sutcliffe, The Garden of Proserpine, 2008, video, 3 min

frIends wItH benefIts

Ben Rivers graduated from the Falmouth School of Art in 1993. he is the recipient of numerous prizes including: the FIPRESCI International Critics Prize at the 68th Venice Film Festival for his first feature film Two Years At Sea; the Baloise Art Prize at Art Basel 42; and the Paul hamlyn Foundation Award for Artists in 2010. Recent exhibitions include: “Slow Action”, hepworth Wakefield, 2012; “Sack Barrow”, hayward Gallery,

London, 2011; “Slow Action”, Matt’s Gallery, London and Gallery TPW, Toronto, 2011; “On Overgrown Paths”, Impressions Gallery, Bradford, 2010; and “A World Rattled of habit”, A Foundation, Liverpool, 2009.

sAturdAy 26 MAy, 2.30pM ICA CIneMA 2sundAy 27 MAy, 6pM ICA CIneMA 1

CurAted by ben rIvers


37


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Friends with Benefits refers neither to the Justin Timberlake sex friend movie, good as it was, nor to people on the dole (though both those themes may have crossed over into this selection of films). This programme is about making films with the good, the unbelievably obliging, and the sometimes long-suffering folk around you. I think a lot about how groups of friends get together in front of and behind the camera, partly because I become friends with the people in my films over the longish periods of time they are made, and also because right now I am halfway through making a collaborative film with Ben Russell. When you’re making things on the cheap, as artists often have to do, your first port of call is usually your friends (‘please will you come to the woods with eight other people and take off your clothes, cover yourself in mud and paint, and wear a mask please’?). There are so many permutations of this that it’s hard to confine to one programme – and there are some great feature examples, like many of the Zanzibar group films, too long to include here. So I’ve put together a list of personal favourites, one each for the last five decades – plus a bonus two minutes from Stephen Sutcliffe (which is a bit cheeky, because it’s not actually his friends in the film, but rather footage from Monty Python, who were indeed all friends from university, mostly mucking around together).


40

sCreenInG proGrAMMe

• Michel Auder, Talking Head, 1981–2009, video, 2 min 27 sec• Danai Anesiadou, I Kiss Your Ectoplasm Like I Would a Shark V, 2010, video, 13 min• Michael Robinson, These Hammers Don’t Hurt Us, 2010, digital video, 12 min 50 sec• Anna Molska, Tanagram, 2006–7, video, 5 min 10 sec• Erkka Nissinen, Night School, 2007, video, 12 min 49 sec• Willehad Eilers aka Wayne horse, The White Suit, 2002, video, 3 min• harald Thys and Jos de Gruyter, Die Fregatte (The Frigate), 2008, video, 19 min• Tamar Guimarães, Tropical blow up, 2009, video, 4 min 45 sec• Nashashibi / Skaer, Flash in the Metropolitan, 2006, 16mm, 3 min

tHIs obsCure obJeCt of desIre or, “no IdeAs exCept In tHInGs”

Elena Filipovic is a writer, art historian, and curator at WIELS Contemporary Art Centre, Brussels. She co-curated the 5th Berlin Biennial (2008) with Adam Szymczyk, and co-edited The Biennial Reader: Anthology on Large-Scale Perennial Exhibitions of Contemporary Art (2010) with Marieke van hal and Solveig Øvstebø. She has curated a number of historic retrospectives, including “Marcel Duchamp: A Work that is not a

Work of ‘Art’” (2008–09), “Felix Gonzalez-Torres: Specific Objects without Specific Form” (2010–11) and “Alina Szapocznikow: Sculpture Undone, 1955–1972” (2011–12), co-curated with Joanna Mytkowska. She has also organised numerous solo exhibitions with artists such as Klara Lidén, Lorna Macintyre, Melvin Moti, Tomo Savic-Gecan, and Tris Vonna-Michell, in addition to group shows including “The Other

sAturdAy 26 MAy, 4.30pM ICA CIneMA 2sundAy 27 MAy, 8pM ICA CIneMA 1

CurAted by elenA fIlIpovIC


41


It was the poet William Carlos Williams who advanced the proclamation, ‘No ideas except in things’, seeming to locate the very potential for ideas at all in material, obdurate, or even mundane stuff. What happens, though, when those ideas that come in the form of solid or concrete ‘things’ inhabit film – that quintessentially immaterial medium, all about projection, flickering light, and ephemeral experience? This Obscure Object of Desire… is a selection of films by artists who each – and each differently – produce moving images arguably haunted by an object that, more than simply taking centre stage, provides the formal or conceptual terms for its own documentation and engagement. In French filmmaker Michel Auder’s Talking Head (1981–2009), an eight-year-old girl is quietly filmed as she speaks to herself, while enraptured in the obsessive power of a mysteriously evoked ‘thingy’. An almost animistic, roast Thanksgiving turkey seems to stand in for other foods stuffed into the open mouth of an unsuspecting restaurant patron in Belgian-Greek artist Danai Anesiadou’s I Kiss Your Ectoplasm Like I Would a Shark V (2010). A mysterious, slowly swirling, gem-encrusted jacket sets the stage for American artist-filmmaker Michael Robinson’s Technicolor, Michael Jackson and Elizabeth Taylor-inspired video These Hammers Don’t Hurt Us (2010). Enigmatic black constructivist forms are pushed

Tradition” (2010), “Anachronism” (2007), and “Let Everything Be Temporary” (2007). She is guest curator for the Prix Ricard, Paris (2012), and was guest curator of the Satellite Program at the Jeu de Paume, Paris in 2010. Since 2007, she has been a tutor of exhibition history and theory on De Appel’s postgraduate curatorial training programme, and an advisor at the Rijksakademie, Amsterdam. her writings have appeared

in numerous artists’ catalogues, as well as Afterall, Frieze, Kaleidoscope, and Mousse.


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around by two men in outfits vaguely reminiscent of futuristic battle gear in Polish artist Anna Molska’s Tanagram (2006–7), while an animated panda (among other oddities) is the object of love in Finnish artist Erkka Nissinen’s marriage of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Paul McCarthy’s erotic-scatological antics and the Teletubbies, in Night School (2007). The dead pan insertion of a young man in a ‘white suit’ into various unlikely locales forms the basis of German artist Willehad Eilers aka Wayne horse’s eponymously titled video The White Suit (2002). Belgian filmmaker duo harald Thys and Jos de Gruyter’s Die Fregatte (The Frigate) (2008) is an eerie, daunting drama of a black frigate that obsesses a group of recreation room escapees. In Brazilian artist Tamar Guimarães’ Tropical blow up (2009), various found photographs bleed into a moving image mystery where the enigmatic object, repeatedly pointed to but never seen (a corpse just out of view?), remains persistently indiscernible. Finally, mute museum objects are momentarily lit like animals caught in headlights in British artists Rosalind Nashashibi and Lucy Skaer’s sumptuous 16mm collaboration, Flash in the Metropolitan (2006). The numinous power of things and those obscure objects of these artists’ desires are the subject here, revealing something like a potential new mantra: No films except in things.



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Tamar Guimarães, Tropical blow up, 2009, video. Courtesy the artist and Fortes Vilaça Gallery.

Nashashibi / Skaer, Flash in the Metropolitan, 2006, 16mm.Courtesy LUX and the artists.


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we only dreAM of plACes And resIstAnCe, for now

sAturdAy 26 MAy, 4pM ICA CIneMA 1sundAy 27 MAy, 2pM ICA CIneMA 1

CurAted by CArMen bIllowsseleCted froM tHe lux/ICA CurAtorIAl open CAll

sCreenInG proGrAMMe

• Cyprien Gaillard, Cities of Gold and Mirrors, 2009, 16mm transferred to digital, 8 min 52 sec• Alexandros Pissourios, Blomqvist, 2011, Super-8 transferred to video, 3 min 5 sec• Joachim Koester, I myself am only a receiving apparatus, 2010, 16mm, 3 min 33 sec• hannes Schüpbach, Falten (Folds), 2005, 16mm, 28 min• Emily Roysdon, Story of History, 2009, video, 7 min 51 sec • Anna Witt, Einsatzübung (Field Test), 2006, video, 5 min 46 sec

• Josephine Meckseper, March on Washington to End the War on Iraq, 9/24/05, 2005, Super-8 transferred to DVD, 8 min 35 sec• Matthias Fritsch, We, Technoviking, 2010, found footage video, 7 min• Ryan McNamara, I Thought It Was You, 2008, 2-channel digital video, 5 min

Carmen Billows is a London-based curator, specialising in film and video. She studied Cultural Studies, Aesthetics & Art history, and Film Studies at Universität Bremen and Université Paris 8, Vincennes. She has worked internationally for art galleries and museums such as Künstlerhaus Bremen; Kunstfabrik am Flutgraben, Berlin; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; and Artists Space, New york. her curatorial trajectory led her to


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Cities, socio-political systems and cultural values are subject to change. Rapid shifts, experiences of loss and estrangement can leave identities fragmented and individuals torn from long-held values and well-known places. In this scenario, the body seems to remain a reliable constant. In moments of re-adjustment, dance, gesture and ritual – generally perceived as a fundamentally human and universal language – can offer an alternative tool of communication. This has been at the core of traditional rites of passage demarcating a moment of transition where ceremonial performance seems to transform the body into a vehicle for memories and emotions as a way of establishing a sense of community and cultural identity. Landscape and architecture seem to contain residues of the past, fragments of histories, and ideas that persist through ruptures and changes. We constantly move through different kinds of spaces and inhabit architectural structures and urban environments whose creation is very often stimulated by political decisions. These artificial spaces seem to stimulate bodily reactions and shape behavioural patterns. Giorgio Agamben famously claimed that society had lost its sense of gesture at the end of the 19th century, but it seems that the surge in the 20th century of art dealing with embodied expression, especially in

London, where she graduated with an MA in Curating Contemporary Art at the Royal College of Art. She has curated and co-curated various projects such as the Video Art Section at Asian hot Shots Berlin 2008 and a major solo show with London-based filmmaker John Smith in 2010. She has a special research interest in international film avant-garde movements, as well as video performance and performative film

production and presentation. her curatorial practice aims to integrate film and video into an interdisciplinary art and gallery context. In recent curatorial projects, she has experimented with site-specific modes of film projection.


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transitory moments, makes up for this loss. Throughout recent history, artists have drawn special attention to moments of transition, invoking through performance their potential for renegotiation. Artists such as Trisha Brown or Jirí Kovanda have responded through their performative interventions in public space to a rapid change in modern cities and conditions of alienation and an increased isolation amongst individuals. In this programme, space and architecture become a stage and the body a tool of communication. Memories of cultures lost or doomed seem to be re-evoked in the stones of architectural residues in Cyprien Gaillard’s film Cities of Gold and Mirrors (2009) and Alexandros Pissourios’ video Blomqvist (2011). Joachim Koester’s work plays with the notion of the body as a place where history is inscribed. Through a bodily engagement with space the actor in his film I myself am only a receiving apparatus (2010) seems to react to the vibrations of the past emanating from a spatial environment. By way of a close observation of movement and gesture, hannes Schüpbach’s film Falten (2005) visualises fundamental patterns of perception and ways of remembering, as well as re-evaluates gestural processes. Emily Roysdon’s work Story of History (2009) is concerned with developing a vocabulary of human gestures that could serve as building blocks within her philosophy of imaginative political representation. In Einsatzübung (Field Test) (2006), Anna Witt develops a dance-like choreography while re-enacting the bodily language of authority and dominance; she playfully dismantles the structures of power in everyday life. In Josephine Meckseper’s March on Washington to End the War on Iraq, 9/24/05 (2005) protest culture transforms the body into a tool for political manifestation and the construction of group identity. A similar but different rite of public self-representation is the fetishism of the body and mannered behaviour in rave culture, as seen


47


in We, Technoviking (2010) by Matthias Fritsch. Meckseper’s as well as Fritsch’s videos take a special interest in our freedom to publicly voice resistance and demonstrate a sense of community. In Ryan McNamara’s I thought it was you (2008), the protagonist confesses the very private and unspeakable in a bodily response to places of personal significance.

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A blurred boundAry Is stIll A boundAry

frIdAy 25 MAy, 4pMICA CIneMA 1sundAy 27 MAy, 4.30pMICA CIneMA 2

CurAted by sHAMA kHAnnAseleCted froM tHe lux/ICA CurAtorIAl open CAll

sCreenInG proGrAMMe

• Neïl Beloufa, Brune Renault, 2009, video, 17 min 45 sec• Rachel Reupke, Containing Matters of no very peaceable Colour, 2009, video, 5 min 11 sec• Gil Leung, This is Living, 2011, SD video, 4 min 2 sec• Nino Pezzella, Zum Briefkasten (To the mailbox), 1989–92, 16mm, 17 min• Lucy Clout, Untitled, 2011, video, 4 min 51 sec

Shama Khanna is a freelance curator and writer based in London. her recent projects include “Brief habits”, the year-long exhibition programme and artists’ film screening series as part of a curatorial residency at E:vent Gallery, London (2011), and the group exhibition and performance programme “Narcissus Trance”, which took place at E:vent Gallery and Spike Island, Bristol during 2010–11.

p. 52–53: Nino Pezzella, Zum Briefkasten (To the mailbox), 1989–92, 16mm. Courtesy the artist.


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A blurred boundAry Is stIll A boundAry

A Blurred Boundary is still a Boundary surveys five Artists’ Moving Image works for changes in the aesthetic language of their films and videos since the advent of Web 2.0. When artists’ film can sit amongst countless youTube clips, or equally be of similar duration to either a film trailer or a feature-length commercial movie, how does this inherent blurring of boundaries in how their work is received affect the content of the work itself and how it is read? The increasing availability of online image archives and blogs makes history easier to look up than to remember. Writer Mark Fisher detects the symptoms of this constant archiving, unlimited playback and ‘resource bingeing’ in our diffused sense of history and temporality. he suggests that our networked status stops at production: ‘There is peer-to-peer distribution of culture, but little sign of peer-to-peer production’.* A Blurred Boundary is still a Boundary looks at how, if at all, artists attempt to overcome this perceived levelling of experience, and slowing down of the modes of production and reception of their moving image work, via techniques of language, aesthetics and loopholes in perception. Presenting work by five contemporary artists alternately working in film and video, in the studio, with performance, found footage and diegetic recording, the programme suggests how these filmmakers might acknowledge the boundary between watching videos on a laptop and in the cinema, whilst confronting the predetermined rhetoric of both contexts. here the flatness of the screen as a metaphor for the levelling of visual culture as anti-historical matter is challenged, by imagining instead the possibility for sincerity, intimacy or an aura, to be reclaimed within the artifice of the mediated or repeated image.

* Mark Fisher, ‘Running on Empty’, The New Statesman online, 30 March 2012.


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tHe sensIble stAGe: perforMAnCes

frIdAy 25 MAy, 9.30pMICA tHeAtre

AnnAbel freArson, GAIl pICkerInG, JIMMy robert And CArA tolMIeperforMAnCes Co-produCed by brIdGet Crone / plenty proJeCts In AssoCIAtIon wItH pICture tHIs

The Sensible Stage: Performances explores theatricality and modes of performance in relation to both film and the ‘live’ event. The programme includes a new performance by Gail Pickering, Not Yet, No Longer (2012) that continues her series of unique live events, Sixty Six Signs of Neon (2010–ongoing), which was recently included in the “British Art Show 7”. The works in this programme utilise the affective space of performance in different ways. Annabel Frearson, Frankenstein 2, 2012, live performance with sound

Annabel Frearson re-works the text of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein into something both sinister and corporeal.

Jimmy Robert, Emma/Mystique, 2001, Super-8 transferred to 16mm

Emma/Mystique (2001) juxtaposes two sets of footage, both depicting a lone figure in everyday, familiar neighbourhoods. Movement and gesture link the figures – for example, the touch of a hand on a rough, stone wall or along a metal fence – yet there is also a haunting sense of distance between the filmed figures and between

This programme of performances celebrates the launch of The Sensible Stage: Staging and the Moving Image, a collection of newly commissioned texts that explore the moving image in relation to performance, time and the event, edited by Bridget Crone and published by Picture This. Bridget Crone / Plenty Projects is a curator and writer based in London working across the UK and internationally. She convenes


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tHe sensIble stAGe: perforMAnCes

what takes place on the screen and ourselves.

Cara Tolmie, Myriad Mouth Line, 2011, live performance with sound

Cara Tolmie’s Myriad Mouth Line constitutes a space for affect in which the body and the unspeaking voice evoke, delineate and structure the space of the performance itself.

Gail Pickering, Not Yet, No Longer, 2012, live performance, musician, projected video, sound, lights

Pickering’s Not Yet, No Longer raises the spectral body of a 1970s community television archive:

dead transmissions and a petrified studio audience cause us to inhabit and reflect on the ‘real labour of representation’.

Gail Pickering, Sixty Six Signs of Neon, 2010–ongoing, video. Courtesy the artist.

Film Exercise, a monthly screening and discussion programme, and has a particular interest in contemporary moving image and performance practices. She was Director of Media Art Bath from 2006 to 2011, and in addition, has curated exhibitions and projects by artists including Gail Pickering, Tom Nicholson, Clare Gasson, and Pil and Galia Kollectiv; and for organisations such as Ian Potter Museum, Melbourne; holburne

Museum, Bath; Arnolfini, Bristol and The Showroom, London. Picture This is an artists’ film and video commissioning agency and service provider. It commissions, produces and presents work across two platforms: its innovative Studio and its new project space, Video Shop.


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erIs: tHe pAtH of er

sAturdAy 26 MAy, 9.30pMICA tHeAtre

ClAIre HooperperforMAnCe Co-produCed by eleCtrA

Eris: The Path of ER (2012) is a new performance commission by Claire hooper, drawing on Greek mythology as a narrative device and treading a fine line between classical theatre, docu-fiction and soap drama. The work is an exploration of strength, tracing the experiences of Danielle Marie Shillingford, a woman who has lost, and struggles to regain custody of her children. In the film, the slippages between Danielle and her god-like alter ego Eris, the goddess of strife and discord, creates a continuous blurring between the fantastical, the superhuman and the absolutely mundane. here loss becomes both the source of suffering, and the root of a boundless force and power – a tension which cannot be contained by realism alone. The performance departs from hooper’s 2011 film Eris, and takes the form of a part-film, part-performance delivery by Danielle with a narration by Grime MC Lioness and a specifically developed live soundtrack by musician and composer Beatrice Dillon.

Eris (2011) was commissioned by Film London Artists’ Moving Image Network (FLAMIN), Picture This, Bristol and Lighthouse, Brighton with the support of Arts Council England.


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erIs: tHe pAtH of er

Electra is a London-based contemporary art organisation that curates, commissions and produces projects by artists working across sound, moving image, performance and the visual arts. Through close dialogue with a range of venues and collaborators, we present projects across the UK and internationally. Recent projects include, “her Noise: Feminisms and the Sonic” (2012) at Tate Modern, London; Pauline Boudry/Renate

Lorenz, “Toxic” (2012) at Les Laboratoires D’Aubervilliers and Palais de Tokyo, Paris, and South London Gallery (2012); and “The Right to Silence” (2012) at South London Gallery.

Claire hooper, Eris: The Path of ER, 2012. Courtesy the artist.


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A MetHodoloGy for A pHospHoresCent sCreen

This late-night screening programme is selected and edited specifically for a phosphorescent screen, featuring C-100 Film Corporation / Direct Effect’s Public Service Announcements (1990–92); Stuart Baker’s Music and Commodity (1988); James Richards’ Untitled (Cinema Programme) (2006); Gil Leung’s The French Drop (2012); and Ed Atkins’ Delivery to the following recipient failed permanently: A Trail (2011). The event is a response to a screening programme commissioned by Wysing Arts Centre for the exhibition “The Starry Rubric Set” in 2011.

sAturdAy 26 MAy, 10.30pMICA tHeAtre

ed AtkIns GAretH bell-Jones GIl leunG JAMes rICHArds

A Methodology for a Phosphorescent Screen. Courtesy the artists


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boredoM And ornAMent

sundAy 27 MAy, 9.30pMICA tHeAtre

sHelly nAdAsHI, CHArlotte prodGer & CorIn sworn, And sopHIe MACpHerson & ClAre stepHensonperforMAnCes Co-produCed by trAMwAy, GlAsGow

Shelly NadashiRefrigerating Apparatus / Medium, 2012

Combining sculpture, telekinesis, a guide to email etiquette, and Kung Fu Kata exercise patterns, performance artist Shelly Nadashi explores the distinctions between muteness and speech, movement versus stasis, and performance versus installation. her latest performance Refrigerating Apparatus (2011) will

be shown with a new short film Medium (2012), which portrays three different conversations between fictional characters told in an exaggerated, theatrical manner. Taking the form of jokes or abstracted scenarios, these stories are told whilst three objects are spun at different speeds by the artist’s hand on a rotating platform. Slowly, as if through the objects’ motions, narrative associations begin to form and the objects develop their own stories, histories and personalities.

Corin Sworn & Charlotte ProdgerHDHB, 2011

Cinema may be dying but aspects of its experience are ubiquitous – its echoes are found in having one’s hearing tested in a sound-proof

Shelly Nadashi, performance from “Text Me Faster Dance Company”, Transmission Gallery, 2011. Courtesy the artist


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boredoM And ornAMent

booth or sitting at the kitchen table watching a downloaded film. Often, when a film is re-shot in a cinema illegally, it is at an oblique angle and some of the image is lost. Glasgow-based artists Corin Sworn and Charlotte Prodger’s collaborative performance-film HDHB (2011) uses this reframing and compression to critique hierarchies of image quality,

suggesting industrial modes of calibration as a process of sensory normalisation.

Sophie Macpherson & Clare Stephenson SHOPLIFTERS SHOPGIRLS, 2011

Working in collaboration, the artists developed SHOPLIFTERS SHOPGIRLS (2011) while in residence at Tramway, using the different functions and spaces of the building as a backdrop to a discussion about performance, ritual, theatricality, and the use and production of objects. This period of experimentation led to a live event at Tramway, which the artists have reinterpreted for the Biennial.

Tramway is an international art-space that commissions, produces and presents contemporary art projects. Claire Jackson is currently Visual Art curator at Tramway, and has curated a number of exhibitions and events with international and emergent artists since 2008. Projects so far have involved significant new commissions and events with artists including Pablo Bronstein, Sebastian Buerkner, Christoph

Büchel, Duncan Campbell, Phil Collins, Redmond Entwistle, Torsten Lauschmann, Lara Favaretto, and hilary Lloyd. During her time at Tramway, Jackson has initiated significant research into the development of interdisciplary and event-based strands of programming.

Sophie Macpherson & Clare Stephenson, SHOPLIFTERS SHOPGIRLS, 2011, performance. Courtesy the artist.


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The Live Journal is the online blog for the LUX/ICA Biennial of Moving Images. For the duration of the festival, it will present commentary, analysis and up-to-the minute reportage. Featuring previews and responses to the festival’s screenings and performances, video interviews with participating filmmakers, live recordings of festival talks and events, the journal reacts to the Biennial as it unfolds, effectively becoming its legacy document. The Live Journal is a project that seeks to broaden the experience of young and upcoming writers interested in developing their skills within the fast-paced, diverse context of the Biennial environment. The Live Journal team – Amy Budd, Thomas Morgan Evans and Jonathan P Watts – were selected from an open call and will be writers-in-residence for the duration of the Biennial. The editor is Isla Leaver-yap.

biennialofmovingimages.org.uk

wednesdAy 23 MAy to sundAy 27 MAy

lIve JournAl


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tAlks

The Biennial hosts a series of chaired panel discussions and talks, presented in association with Film London Artists’ Moving Image Network (FLAMIN), exploring current issues in contemporary Artists’ Moving Image practice.

tHeAtrICAlIty And stAGInGsAturdAy 26 MAy 2.30pM, ICA tHeAtreChaired by curator and writer Bridget Crone.With curator Vanessa Desclaux, artist Beatrice Gibson, and Pil and Galia Kollectiv.

Recent debates have disrupted and complicated the separation between theatre and performance, but what do these debates mean for the moving image – how does the image itself become live and material in form? A distinguished panel tackles subjects raised in The Sensible Stage: Staging the Moving Image, a new collection of essays edited by Bridget Crone.

CIneMA As ArtsAturdAy 26 MAy 4.30pM, ICA tHeAtreChaired by writer, researcher and lecturer Maeve Connolly. With artist Jesse Jones; artist, curator and writer Ian White; and artist, writer and curator Lucy Reynolds.

Considering the cinema as a suitable site for Artists’ Film and Moving Image, the panel discusses the shifting contexts of collective viewing and investigates how showing moving image work in the gallery, cinema or screening room can challenge the ways we engage with Artists’ MovingImage.

GlobAl CentressundAy 27 MAy 2.30pM, ICA tHeAtreChaired by writer and academic May Adadol Ingawanij.With curator Shanay Jhaveri, writer and curator Omar Kholeif, and others.

Globalism and the art world’s dependence on the market question the need for a new global centre. Considering the political and demographic shifts of the 20th century, the paneldiscusses moving image practice from a variety of global locations.

ArtIsts’ lonG-forM fIlMMAkInGsundAy 27 MAy 4.30pM, ICA tHeAtreChaired by Stuart Comer, Curator of Film at Tate Modern, London.With filmmaker John Akomfrah, artist Ben Rivers, and others.

A distinguished panel discusses the realities and practicalities of artists’ long-form filmmaking.With the rise of artists working in feature-length productions, questions of audience, sustainability and infrastructure are raised.


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student syMposIuM

The two-day student symposium is co-produced by the LUX/Central Saint-Martins MRes Art: Moving Image course and was open to submissions from UK-based MA and PhD students. Two sessions explore the ideas ‘On Failure’ and ‘Contemporary Currents’ with papers presented by students and keynote speakers, Jan Verwoert and Maeve Connolly.

on fAIluresAturdAy 26 MAy 10AM–1pM, ICA tHeAtreKeynote speaker: Jan Verwoert Why Rudie Can’t FailJan Verwoert is a critic, writer, curator, art historian, and contributing editor to Frieze magazine.

Further papers by:Anirban Gupta-Nigam, Failure as Possibility: Reading Two Fragments of Moving-Image WorkJawaharlal Nehru University, School of Arts and Aesthetics, Delhi

Robert Rapoport The End of Ethnographic Representation in Huyghe’s ‘The Host and the Cloud’Ruskin School, Oxford

Rosa Menkman The Intentional Faux-PasKunsthochschule für Medien, Cologne

Emily Candela No signal: Failures of transmission in the moving image from analogue ‘snow’ to the ‘ blue screen of death’Royal College of Art and the Science Museum, London

ConteMporAry CurrentssundAy 27 MAy 10AM–1pM, ICA tHeAtreKeynote speaker: Maeve Connolly Television, Cultural Legitimation and Contemporary ArtMaeve Connolly is a writer, lecturer and research fellow at Internationales Kolleg für Kulturtechnikforschung und Medienphilosophie (IKKM), Weimar Bauhaus University.

Further papers by:Katy Connor From Solid Light to Satellite: the materiality of the moving image as broadcast signal and dataEMERGE, Bournemouth University Media School

Christopher C de Selincourt Where is the Mind of the Media Editor?Cardiff School of Art and Design

Rebecca Birch Field MontageLoughborough University School of the Arts

Marialaura Ghidini Working through and beyond web-based video platforms: towards a redefinition of moving imageCRUMB, University of Sunderland

Andy Weir Deep Time Contagion: Nuclear Storage and the Nonhuman Temporality of MovingImage ArtworkGoldsmiths College, London


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ArtIsts’ sCHool

From 23–27 May, the Artists’ School will be convening behind the scenes at the ICA for an intensive series of seminars, presentations and discussions led by artist, writer and curator Ian White, that respond to the screenings and events taking place during the LUX/ICA Biennial of Moving Images. Visiting artists, academics and curators include Thomas Beard, Maeve Connolly, Fatima hellberg, May Adadol Ingawanij, Martha Kirszenbaum, Irene Revell, and Emily Roysdon. The Artists’ School is now fully subscribed, but a special event will be devised by the participants during the Biennial and announced online.

Ian White is an artist, curator and writer working mainly in performance and Artists’ Moving Image. Performance works include Trauerspiel 1 (hebbel Am Ufer Theater, Berlin, 2012), the solo exhibition “Ibiza Black Flags Democracy” (daadgalerie, Berlin, 2010) and Hinterhof (KUB Arena, Kunsthaus Bregenz, 2010–11), as well as collaborations with Jimmy Robert and Emily Roysdon. From 2001 to 2011, he was Adjunct Film

Curator for the Whitechapel Gallery, London, Associate Curator of The Secret Public: The Last Days of the British Underground, 1978–1988 (Kunstverein Munich, 2006–7), and curator of a monographic exhibition of films by Emily Wardill (De Appel, Amsterdam, 2010), with whom he co-authored We Are Behind. he has written extensively on Artists’ Moving Image and is the co-editor of Kinomuseum: Towards an artists’ cinema.


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CurAtInG ArtIsts’ MovInG IMAGe Course

Running concurrently with the Artists’ School, a Curating Artists’ Moving Image Course brings together curators from across the UK for two day-long sessions, which include presentations and discussions exploring curating, programming and working with Artists’ Moving Image, led by curator, writer and artist George Clark. The Curating Artists’ Moving Image Course is now fully subscribed.Guest curators, academics and artists include Rebecca Shatwell, Gil Leung, Melissa Castagnetto, Erik Martinson, Ed halter, Robert Leckie, Michelle Cotton, Martha Kirszenbaum and Will Rose.

George Clark is a writer, curator and artist based in London and Los Angeles. he was one of the curators of the 6th Bangkok Experimental Film Festival (2012) and curated the Lav Diaz focus at the “AV Festival 12: As Slow As Possible”, Newcastle (2012). Other curatorial projects include “Infermental” for Focal Point Gallery, Southend-on-Sea (2010) with Dan Kidner and James Richards, and “No Wave: New

york 1976–1982” for Glasgow Film Festival; Worm, Rotterdam; and Cinéma Nova, Brussels (all 2011).


Published on the occasion of the LUX/ICA Biennial of Moving Images 2012Institute of Contemporary Arts24–27 May 2012

The Biennial is a collaboration between LUX and the Institute of Contemporary Arts, coordinated by Steven Cairns, ICA Associate Curator of Artists’ Film and Moving Images, and assistant coordinator, Nicole yip.

Design: Sarah BorisWebsite: Tom RobertsTechnical Support: Adam Jones, John RivettPrinting: healeys

Published by LUX and the ICA

ColopHon

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored on a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means mechanical, photocopying or otherwise, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.All images courtesy the artists. All texts copyright the authors.

Supported by Arts Council England

With additional thanks to: Central St MartinsEsmée Fairbairn FoundationUK Film CouncilThe Edwin Fox FoundationThe London ConsortiumInstitut Français du Royaume-UniBritish Council

LUX18 Shacklewell LaneLondon E8 2EZ+44 20 7503 3980www.lux.org.uk

Benjamin CookMike SperlingerGil Leung Lyn French Silvia McMenamin

Institute of Contemporary ArtsThe MallLondon SW1y 5Ah+44 20 7930 3647www.ica.org.uk

Gregor Muir Karen Turner Matt Williams Anna Gritz


24–27

May20

12biennialofmovingimages.org.uk

ICA Reader Cover6.indd 1 17/05/2012 11:43

lux/ica biennial of moving images 2012 programme booklet

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