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| Block by Emily Richardson, 16mm Film. |
Artists' Experimental Film & Video Screening
24 MARCH 2019
Ramsgate Music Hall
13 Turner Street, Ramsgate, CT11 8NJ
Doors: 7pm (bar open)
Programme: 7.30 - 9.30 inc Q&A*
TICKETS
£6/4 (+50p online booking fee via Eventbrite) also available on the door.
Featuring: Nicky Hamlyn, Noor Afshan Mirza & Brad Butler, Nicholas Mortimer, Gareth Polmeer and Emily Richardson.
This bumper edition has been guest curated by Benjamin Hunt.
Home page image: 'The Virtual-Grammetry of Main Frame City 360 - [A Borgesian Statistic]' by Nicholas Mortimer.
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FULL PROGRAMME NOTES
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Home page image: 'The Virtual-Grammetry of Main Frame City 360 - [A Borgesian Statistic]' by Nicholas Mortimer.
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FULL PROGRAMME NOTES
TO THE FILMIC
RAMSGATE MUSIC HALL
24 MARCH 2019, 7 – 9.30pm
Programmed by Benjamin Hunt
for Analogue Ensemble
GARETH POLMEER
Sea
HD Video, Colour, Silent, 4 mins, 2011
Images of sky and sea on the horizon form linear bands
of colour through the spatial and temporal composition of scan lines. The video
is composed of multiple instances of recordings looking out to sea. These have
been layered and masked in different configurations with areas one pixel in
height, each offset by varying iterations of 1/25th of a second from the next.
These layers are duplicated and reversed for a looping projection such that the
images develop through one another like a palindrome, with the textures a
series of colour fields.
NICHOLAS MORTIMER
1:24 mins
White Line Theory
9:06 mins
Much of my solo work is interested in how reality, its
representation and performance can be designed or deployed. My practise
looks to mechanisms found in narratology to explore themes found within
cultural studies of media and technology, historical research and theory in
order to explore relations between perceptions of reality, systems of control
and the blurred boundaries of fact and fiction.
My current work is exploring the
extent to which histories of technology can be used to reflect on the outcomes
of an expanded computational world. Issues surrounding the notion of work,
production, decision and change all combine in a search for new narrative
spaces created between data and knowledge, speed and attention, spaces which
are home to changing behaviours enabled by technology of all kinds. My most recent
work has focused on the development of a system of characters, contexts and
dialogues resulting in multiple scripted outcomes ranging from songs, plays,
role play games, podcasts and collaborative fictions.
NICKY HAMLYN
Quadrants & 4 x 3
x 2
16m black and white film, multi projector performance,
variable duration, 2016, 2018
Gasometers 4
16mm, colour, silent, 8 mins, 2014
Quadrants and 4 x 3 x
2 are part of an ongoing series of 16mm loop works for multi-projector
performance. Previous such works include 4 X LOOPS (1974) and Rings (2012). In
each case a simple repeating pattern is assembled into a shifting set of
conjunctions and overlapping arrangements through the repositioning of the
projectors during performance. Phase patterns, in which the images move in and
out of sync, are an essential feature of the works.
Gasometers is the
third and final in a trilogy of such films. The film’s subject is Gas Holders,
or ‘Gasometers’ as they are known. The one in this film was built in the late
1800s, in Mary Neuner road, on the edge of an industrial estate between Wood
Green and Hornsey, North London.
My primary interest with the film is in terms of the way the
Holders filter, reflect, refract and break up the light that falls on them. The
latticework columns and circular girders generate complex patterns of
overlapping shadow movements and shifts of light. These are compounded because
Gas Holders often come in pairs, so that there is additional interplay between
the two, which cast shadows on each other over the course of a day. I am also
interested in what they are as objects. They are not solid, but airy and
graceful, basket-like, forming zigzag patterns at a micro level in the
structure of individual girders, and at a macro level in the diagonal
cross-wires that reinforce the main girders.
EMILY RICHARDSON
Block
16mm, Colour, Sound, 12 mins, 2005
Day through night Block is a portrait of a 1960s
London tower block, its interior and exterior spaces explored and revealed,
patterns of activity building a rhythm and viewing experience not dissimilar
from the daily observations of the security guard sat watching the flickering
screens with their fixed viewpoints and missing pieces of action.
Block was made over a period of 10 months in a tower block
in south east London from 2004–05. The film is a portrait of the place that
came out of much time spent there. The contrast between the exterior and
interior of the building, the impersonal common spaces and the personal spaces
of the interior of people’s flats gives shape to the portrait.
The security guards’ office and the bank of CCTV monitors
with their random editing patterns and missing pieces of action were used as a
starting point in terms of the camera techniques and editing structures
employed in the film. All seeing, but seeing nothing at the same time. Working
with static camera the fixed shots are repeated and edited together in sequence
in a similar way to the CCTV camera recordings that flick from one camera view
to another, often disrupting the (visual) ‘narrative’.
The soundtrack was built up from recordings made on location
at the time of shooting and sounds gathered from various sources and was
composed and mixed by Jonah Fox.
NOOR AFSHAN MIRZA & BRAD BUTLER
The Exception and The
Rule
SD Video, B/W & Colour, Stereo Sound, 2009, 39 mins
Shot primarily in Karachi, The Exception and the Rule
employs a variety of strategies in negotiating consciously political themes.
Avoiding traditional documentary modes, the film frames everyday activities
within a period of civil unrest, incorporating performances to camera, public
interventions and observation. This complex work is part of Mirza/Butler's
project 'The Museum of Non Participation' 2008-2016.
BIOGRAPHIES
NICKY HAMLYN
Hamlyn is a filmmaker and writer on artists’ experimental
film and video based in the UK. He
teaches at the University for the Creative Arts (UCA) in Kent and Surrey, and
at the Royal College of Art in London. His book, Film Art Phenomena (2003), is
published by the British Film Institute. He has also co-edited, with A.L.Rees
and Simon Payne, a collection of essays on the Austrian film-maker Kurt Kren,
Kurt Kren: Structural Films (Intellect Books, 2016) and, with Vicky Smith,
Experimental and Expanded Animation (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). His work has
been shown widely at festivals and one-person shows around the World.
NICHOLAS MORTIMER
b. 1983
Nicholas Mortimer is an artist using scenographic and
narratological techniques to interrogate emerging techno-political concerns. He
produces films, plays, educational workshops and exhibitions in a wide range of
media and across multiple platforms. He recently launched Post Workers Theatre
with Dash n Dem - a collaborative design troupe who investigate performative
persuasion and modes of agitation. He is also a co-founder of Scene Everything
Studio who specialise in exhibition and production design and currently
co-leads the BA year 3 studio at Goldsmiths Design Department. Recent
exhibitions include 4th Istanbul Design Biennial X Festival du Film Invisible,
VVFA Radio London, ZK/U Audio platform Berlin, Corridor III:
Valdemar Daa - Viborg Kunsthal. nicholasmortimer.net
GARETH POLMEER
Gareth Polmeer is an artist and writer, and a lecturer at
the Royal College of Art. garethpolmeer.com
EMILY RICHARDSON
Emily Richardson is a filmmaker whose work explores our
relationship to our physical environment and the role image making technologies
and sound play in defining, changing and shaping it. Her films are encounters
with a diverse range of landscapes and sites in transition ranging from empty
East End London streets, forests, North Sea oil fields, post-war tower blocks,
empty cinemas and Cold War military facilities. She has recently completed a
practice-led PhD at the Royal College of Art researching the translation of
architectural space to filmic space through a trilogy of films about British
architects prototype houses of the 1960s. Her films have been shown in
galleries, museums and festivals internationally and are distributed by Lux,
London and Lightcone, Paris. emilyrichardson.org.uk
NOOR AFSHAN MIRZA
AND BRAD BUTLER
Noor Afshan Mirza and Brad Butler, founders of the London-based centre for artist film production, no.w.here, create work which spans the moving image, installation, sound, text and performed actions. Their practice explores themes of resistance, inequality, power and privilege, and (non) participation. They are interested in art that questions the deep state, unreliable narration and the ectoplasm of neoliberalism, while investigating the use of women’s bodies as sites of resistance. Differentiating between work made ‘in’ struggle and work made about struggle, they use an expanded notion of body politics stretching from irrational and non-verbal knowing to how resistance is inscribed in the body and how the body memorises traumatic experience.
Noor and Brad are well-known for their fictional construct The Museum of Non Participation (2008-2016), which interrogated the synergies of politics and art. Past exhibitions include installations at The Sydney Biennale (2016); Hayward Gallery, London (2015); Whitechapel Gallery, London (2015); Walker Art Centre, Minneapolis (2013); and Performa 13, New York (2013). They are recipients of the Paul Hamlyn Foundation Award for Visual Artists 2015 and were nominated for Artes Mundi 6 (2014), a prize dedicated to visual arts engaging with the human condition. Noor and Brad live between London and Istanbul. museumofnonparticipation.org
BENJAMIN HUNT
Benjamin Hunt is an audio-image based artist who deals
with the boundaries between the still and moving image, silence and noise. The
intersections between photography, video and animation are investigated
alongside material issues with the recording and processing of sound. The
kinetic and time based relationships between sound and image are often trialled
and tested. Transient coastal architecture that alters via varying tidal
levels are often sites for investigation which are used as objects to tease out
reflexive and material concerns with photographic and sound based
technologies and practices. The relationship between numerical, modular,
and geometric specificities located within a site and its influence
on the material process, shape and structure of the subsequent work made are
themes of current interest.
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