SELECTIONS
Night Soil — Nocturnal Gardening
Melanie Bonajo, 2016, 49 min 47 sec
Nocturnal Gardening portrays a group of women living by alternative norms who have each, on their own, established communities. The women stand for sensitivity, connection, and communication with other communities, plants, animals, and elements. They attune their energy to the ecosystem around them with an enhanced sensibility. They are friends with the Earth and dependent members of the community of Nature. They explore new ways of togetherness and do so in a pragmatic, personal way. This film is a conversion of human psychic content into an imagery that enhances our moral landscape for our own decision making, in terms of ecology and interdependent values, as well as in the care for ourselves, our neighbours, and our earth.
Sounds from Beneath
Mikhail Karikis & Uriel Orlow, 2010–11, 6 min 41 sec
In Sounds from Beneath, a desolate disused colliery in East Kent, once populated with workers, machines, and the sounds of their activities, is brought back to life through song. The video centres around a choral piece for which Mikhail Karikis invites an ex-miners’ choir to recall and sing the subterranean sounds of a working coal mine. It transforms into an amphitheatre resonating sounds of explosions in the ground, machines cutting the coal-face, shovels scratching the earth, and the distant melody of the Miner’s Lament, all sung by Snowdown Colliery Welfare Male Voice Choir grouping in formations reminiscent of picket lines.
]]>Videos will be shown on a continuous loop during opening hours over the course of Stagings. Soundings. Readings. Free Jazz II.
21 – 30 September 2018
Mariana Silva, Digital Specimens: Pointcloudfallout, 2015, 10 min 35 sec
In Digital Specimens: Pointcloudfallout an offscreen dialogue, set in the near future, unfolds on the politics of scanning artefacts and monuments into 3-D. Amidst the consequences of climate change and war, the two characters discuss how digital copies unsettle repatriation claims and colonial tensions under the pretext of digital conservation.
2 – 7 October 2018
Justin Shoulder and Bhenji Ra, Deep Alamat, 2014, 4 min
Deep Alamat is a compelling narrative concerning two mythic figures, “OO” and “Beige Cantrell,” drawn from the artists’ collective imaginations. Shoulder’s OO is from his series of Fantastic Creaturesthat feature sculptural costumes and are animated in live performance, video, and photographic works. OO’s patterns are a form of Aposematism (warning colouration). OO performs a gestural dance drawing from animal signals and carnivalesque spectacle. Initially inspired by a one-hit-wonder pop star, Beige Cantrell derives from Ra’s obsession with digital failure, internet hype, software intelligence, and the online secondary experience. Ra’s understanding of movement, body control, and precision allows for his character to physically represent ideas of recognition software as he scans, detects, and aligns his body accordingly.
9 – 14 October 2018
Anton Ginzburg, Ultraviolet, 2015, 25 min
Ultraviolet explores the issues of perception and phenomenology at the intersection of nature and technology. The film is divided into three parts that correspond to the musical structure and composition. The film was conceived as an ongoing dialogue with its soundtrack composed by Michael Pisaro. The relationship between the cinematic image and the live sound is an experiment in a tradition of expanded cinema. It starts with very high frequencies in the first part, later working its way down into the guitar range. The film addresses the aura of representation through the video footage of various landscapes such as waterfalls, trees, and mountains, both in high- and low-res.
16 – 21 October 2018
Vladimir Erofeev, Pamir: Krysha mira (Pamir: Roof of the World), 1927, 49 min (original: 71 min)
Version with music by Carlos Casas
23 – 28 October 2018
Phill Niblock, The Magic Sun, 1966, 60 min
Shot in 1966, while the Sun Ra Arkestra was still based in New York City (before relocating to Philadelphia in 1968), the composer and filmmaker Phill Niblock’s The Magic Sun is an obscure artefact of profound beauty. It features frenetic black-and-white footage of the band playing, and an incredible soundtrack. Its existence displays an often understated relationship between two contemporary iterations of the New York avant-garde. Considering the neglect that free jazz usually suffers in the face of its peer, the film could be considered important for that alone, being also a wonderful journey through sight and sound.
30 October – 6 November 2018
Luke Fowler, Country Grammar (with Sue Tompkins), 2017, 18 min 29 sec
The film begins with Tompkins performing at Chem19 Recording Studio. The camera films from a multitude of perspectives, employing rhythmic pans, tilts, and opaque or reflective screens. These distorted views, combined with non-synchronised images of the performer, depart from a 70s “direct cinema” approach to filming musicians. After the ritualistic opening section, the film widens its view to locations outside of the studio. The repetition of actions (picking books from a shelf, re-arranging the contents of a fridge) suggest a searching for a threshold between the filmed image and Tompkins’ own spoken word acts. Taking cues from the performers’ hypnotic yet concrete play with words, the film creates a metaphoric, symbiotic language, where an open-ended approach to montage transcends both reductive imagery and straight documentation.
A public programme of Stagings. Soundings. Readings. Free Jazz II.
Margaret Tait, Garden Pieces, 1998, 11 min 30 sec
Filmmaker-poet Margaret Tait’s last film Garden Pieces is a triptych of “film-poems” composed around the theme of the garden. Garden Pieces is a vibrant, experimental film that utilises live action shots and hand-painted elements to draw upon the wanderings of daily life and the search for fleeting moments of presence, dropping a myopic intensification of experience in favour of an exuberant engagement with the world.
Uriel Orlow, The Crown Against Mafavuke, 2016, 18 min 45 sec
The Crown Against Mafavuke is based on a South African trial from 1940. Mafavuke Ngcobo was a traditional herbalist who was accused by the local white medical establishment of “untraditional behaviour.” The film explores the ideological and commercial confrontation between two different yet intertwining medicinal traditions and their uses of plants, with slippages across gender and race that further questions notions of purity and origination. The re-imagined court case is filmed at the Palace of Justice in Pretoria, where the Rivonia trial was held that sent Mandela and his fellow accused to the Robben Island prison.
Jef Cornelis, Kunst Als Kritiek. Wanneer is Kunst Wel Kritiek? 4. Wanneer de Kunstenaar in alle Ernst Speelt. (Art as Criticism. When is Art Criticism? 4. When the artist is in all seriousness.), 1973, 4 min 47 sec
This film is part of a series of short sketches thematically focusing on the question, “When is Art Criticism?” developed for the BRT (Belgian Radio and Television) broadcast network. For this fourth episode, it proposes an answer: “When the artist is toying around in all seriousness.” It highlights the Belgian artist Jef Geys, whose approach is best described by the phrase “Many a true word is spoken in jest.” In Geys’s statement, framed as a public announcement, the artist uses the programme’s broadcasting time as a publicity stunt, revealing the mechanisms of the medium of television. In a lengthy word of thanks, the extensive media bureaucracy is stripped of its front, mentioning the relative cost of the programme and the broadcasting time.
Part of the BRT television series “Openbaar Kunstbezit” (“Public Art Heritage”). A second version was adapted for the NOS, a Dutch radio and television broadcast network.
Inge Godelaine, 7 x Jef Geys, 2014, 27 min
7 x Jef Geysis a documentary film by independent filmmaker Inge Godelaine, who worked for many years with Geys.
The film interviews seven people who each have a different relationship with the artist—Yves Gevaert, Mia Dammen, Hugo Criekemans, Greta Meert, curator Dirk Snauwaert, daughter Nina Geys, and Joris Note—creating a unique portrait of the artist through the people who knew him.
Inge Godelaine, Villa Wintermans, 2009, 50 min
Inge Godelaine travelled to São Paulo 18 years after Jef Geys created his architectural intervention Villa Wintermans for the 1991 São Paulo Biennale. Replicating a Flemish modernist villa of the cigar manufacturer Wintermans from Balen that was later used as a school, Villa Wintermans was one of the most complex public projects Geys completed. In this film, Godelaine searches for the remnants of the Villa which have vanished or rotted away, and interviews some of the schoolchildren then about their experience with the donated building. The documentary is an echo of a forgotten artistic deed, and the eventual disappearance of art and architecture.