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Bringing together the artists shortlisted for the 2018 Film London Jarman Award – Larry Achiampong & David Blandy, Jasmina Cibic, Lawrence Lek, Daria Martin, Hardeep Pandhal and Margaret Salmon – this weekend of events explores their different practices through screenings, talks, and performances.
In association with Film London Artists’ Moving Image Network.
Saturday
Daria Martin explores the ways that images touch us by sharing clips from recent and current projects and readings from a recently edited volume. She reveals first hand accounts of those who experience mirror-touch synaesthesia (in which touch to other bodies is felt palpable on one’s own skin), and describes resonances with ‘the touch hungry’ in her most recent film A Hunger Artist. She looks to ways that her new film Tonight the World explores isolation and connection by translating a dream diary archive into embodied form. Martin performs with a collaborator, the actor Flora Nicholson.
Hardeep Pandhal and Emilia Terracciano present Konfessions of a Klabautermann, followed by a live conversation. The discussion takes as a starting point the drawings of Gaganendranath Tagore and their slippery adaptations of Bergsonian humour in the context of India’s independence struggles and beyond.
Concerned with a shifting constellation of relations, such as those between camera and subject, human and animal, or autobiography and ethnography, Margaret Salmon’s films often examine the gendered dynamics of social interactions and representational forms. Following the screening, a conversation between the filmmaker and writer & curator Laura Guy will trace a line from Mm (2017) to Salmon’s forthcoming exhibition Hole at Dundee Contemporary Arts, touching upon feminist word play, pictures of women working cameras, and histories of erotica as they go.
Sunday
In a lecture performance Jasmina Cibic will address a series of projects, which present a synthesis of gesture, stagecraft and re-enactment. Realized in films and installations, these works consist of an on-going performative practice, an ‘enacted’ exercise in the dissection of statecraft, drawing together primary archival sources, reconfigurations of political rhetoric and ideologically tainted architectural spaces. This wilful overwriting creates shifting meanings and highlights historical uncertainties and untruths, especially in the gendering of the past. The talk will play a double game, at once decoding mechanisms of power while building new allegorical structures. The talk will be followed by a conversation with Dr Isobel Harbison.
Lawrence Lek presents an hour-long music video mix about virtual architecture: places the viewer inhabits without being physically present. In his work, Lek uses rendered urban landscapes as an integral part of narratives that contrast machine and human, emotion and automation, alienation and belonging. The mix contains his recent works Pyramid Schemes, a video essay about the symbolism of architecture, and Nøtel, a VR marketing suite for a fully-automated luxury hotel. Nøtel amplifies the anonymity of the hotel, and the strange combination of euphoria and isolation that comes from staying in a building that is a machine dressed up as a domestic space.
Incorporating music, spoken word, and video projection, Larry Achiampong & David Blandy’s performance Media Minerals reflects on how politics of race affect relationships in an age of technology and globalization. The artists have a scripted encounter that relates their personal experiences and geopolitical observations. Their friendship — forged through virtual spaces like video games or WhatsApp — is tested as they consider how the lives of their respective children differ from each other, and what the future may hold for all of mankind. The Media Minerals performance takes the raw materials of the Finding Fanon series into the physical space. This is followed by an in conversation with Skinder Hundal.
12.00 Touring Programme
Daria Martin – A Hunger Artist (2017) 16 min
Hardeep Pandhal – Pool Party Pilot Episode (2018) 8 min
Margaret Salmon – Extract from Eglantine (2016) 10 min
12.45 Break
13.35 Introductions
13.45 Daria Martin – Reflections on the Double with Flora Nicholson
14.45 Hardeep Pandhal – in conversation with Emilia Terracciano
15.45 Break
16.15 Margaret Salmon – in conversation with Dr. Laura Guy
12.00 Touring Programme
Jasmina Cibic– NADA: Act III – The Exhibition (2017) 17 min
Lawrence Lek – Geomancer Chapters 1 and 2 (2018) 20 min
Larry Achiampong & David Blandy – Finding Fanon Part 1 (2015) 15 min
12.55 Break
13.35 Introductions
13.45 Jasmina Cibic – In conversation with Dr Isobel Harbison
14.45 Lawrence Lek – The Artist is Absent (screening programme)
15.45 Break
16.15 Larry Achiampong and David Blandy – Media Minerals Performance and in conversation with Skinder Hundal
Larry Achiampong & David Blandy
Through their collaborative moving image practice, Larry Achiampong (b. 1984) and David Blandy (b. 1976) examine issues of popular culture, race, class and heritage. Their main body of work, The Finding Fanon Series, looks at the politics of race and decolonisation and how this affects our relationship with contemporary culture, technology and globalisation, and is inspired by the lost plays of writer Frantz Fanon.
Jasmina Cibic
With a practice spanning film, installation and performance, Jasmina Cibic (b. 1979) considers how ideologies and cultures are constructed and then framed through mechanisms such as art, choreography, literature, and architecture. Working with actors and dancers who perform for camera, she encourages the viewer to consider the soft power apparatuses that authorities and nations employ for their political aims.
Lawrence Lek
Engaging with the fields of virtual reality and simulation, Lawrence Lek (b. 1982) creates moving image works using gaming software, 3D animation, installation and performance. His digital environments reflect the impact of the virtual world on our perception of reality, by rendering real places and architectures within fictional and often fantastical scenarios.
Hardeep Pandhal
Pandhal works with non-linear forms of digital video which layer lurid hand drawn cartoons, psychedelic and disorienting narratives with his own rap music, presenting them within wider installations and wall drawings. For the Jarman Award, Pandhal presents from a body of work that reroutes the misogynist and racist imagination underpinning white supremacy into cartoon phantasms that haunt contemporary life. The frustrations of societal structures are projected into satirical cartoon worlds, where viewers are presented with seemingly infinite perspectives of recurring yet disjointed scenes.
Daria Martin
Primarily working with 16mm film, Daria Martin (b. 1973) creates highly constructed cinematic worlds in which human gesture is contrasted with mannered artifice to challenge the viewer’s habits of perception. Diverse subjects such as robots, dreams, synaesthesia and magic are considered within peculiar and isolated spaces, creating a sense of the slippages between the internal world and the external, and different levels of consciousness.
Margaret Salmon
Working exclusively with photography and 35mm film and taking an intuitive and often improvised approach to the camera, Margaret Salmon (b.1975) portrays the everyday – our family, friends, relationships and the environments we inhabit. Referencing the aesthetic of different historical cinematic movements, her works bring warmth and lyricism to the tradition of realist film.
Emilia Terracciano is the A. W. Mellon Global South Fellow at Wadham College, Ruskin School of Art and TORCH at Oxford University. Previously, she held a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the Ruskin School of Art, Oxford University. Emilia’s expertise lies in global modernism and contemporary art, focusing on South Asia and its diasporas. Her research and teaching interests include: documentary art practices, film and new media; plant-human encounters, botanical conflicts and science fiction. Her monograph Art and Emergency: Modernism in Twentieth-Century India was published by IB Tauris in 2017. Her writings have been published by Art Journal, Art Bulletin, Marg, Modern Painters, Frieze, Caravan, 1000Words and The Burlington Magazine.
Dr Laura Guy‘s writing on feminist and queer visual culture has been published in various venues including Aperture, Frieze, the Moving Image Review and Art Journal and in the edited collection Feminism and Art History Now. She is currently working on a book titled Lesbian Graffiti.
Dr Isobel Harbison is an art historian and critic based in London. She regularly contributes to titles including Art-Agenda, Art Monthly and frieze. Harbison is Lecturer in Critical Studies in the Art Department, Goldsmiths, teaching on the BA Fine Art and the MA Artists’ Film and Moving Image. Her first book, Performing Image regards the intersection of performance and moving image since the 1960s in order to historicise and contextualise widespread social media use, and individually felt impetuses to perform images. The MIT Press will publish it in February 2019.
Skinder Hundal is Chief Executive of New Art Exchange a leading award winning contemporary art gallery and arts organisation based in the inner city neighbourhood, Hyson Green, Nottingham UK. New Art Exchange is the largest space in the UK featuring art representative of African, Caribbean, South Asian and culturally diverse voices and expressions in contemporary art and culture. Prior to NAE, Skinder was based at Sampad, a leading UK development agency for South Asian and cross cultural arts, based at Midlands Arts Centre – Birmingham, West Midlands.
