Dear Audience,
I’m very sorry not to be at the Cinematek this month to introduce The Dream That Kicks.
I am far away on the other side of the world…..
This month we are pleased and excited to present a selection of six new works by UK-based artists, curated by Gil Leung for LUX
in London. All the works are on 1 tape, but they are in different order to the published programme.
Please note that the credits appear at the end of the tape, and there are no titles to the films, some seconds of black separate each work. The order below is the correct one.
Enjoy the films – and I will see you all in May with another Dream That Kicks!
Greg Pope
WHAT IT IS NOT
Against the new as a merely contemporary form of visibility, the works in this programme consistently interrogate these terms, their own guises, structures and language. Both product of labour and autonomous object, the new work is and is not the thing-in-itself. The new is, in this sense, negative, a duplicitous and illusory new, gone as soon as it is discerned. Gil Leung.
Death Mask 2: The Scent Ed Atkins (UK /2010,/8’mins/video)
Complex and enigmatic fragments; cinematic, literary and fetishistic. From Madame Tussaud to Cannibal Holocaust, the work conflates referential points acting to ingratiate their object while simultaneously destructing any contingent logic.
Phantom Avantgarde Mark Aerial Waller (UK/2010/8mins/16mm to video)
The film itself is made up of collage elements, photocopied and enlarged to life-sized scale from a selection of key films of the cinema of existentialism, as well as images of Parisian intellectuals of the mid 1960’s. Once removed from their historical cultural reference, Waller reconfigures the cut out figures as a parade of mummified bodies, narrated through subtitled text from Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s novel, Journey to the End of the Night.
Concrete Vache Mark Leckey (UK /2010/25mins/video)
Vache Concrete or ‘Ten Years within a Contemporary British Art Gallery as Scripted by Itself’, splices together footage and texts from past exhibitions and publications to create an evocative stream of consciousness narrated by an authoritative computer generated voice. Images here represent the chaotic forces of sex and money. The resulting work embodies a distinctive playfulness and inquisitive curiosity into the dynamics – architectural, spatial and aural – of the gallery, town hall, factory, and bank.
The Artist Laure Prouvost (UK/2010/10mins/ video)
Prouvost employs the rhetoric of conventional forms of narration to blur boundaries between the viewers’ perception of the fictional narrative and the reality of the installation. The rhythm and pace of the editing creates a cacophony of film, painting, sculpture, text and sound. The audience becomes both lost, emphatic and inherently part of the work.
Ramon Requilman Live David Raymond Conroy (UK/2010/6mins/video)
Here we are presented with a certain tension between a device, or a technique and a sincerity or honesty. The subject of the work is complex because there is a strained relationship between the work’s attempt at depicting and thus comenting on the reality aside from it. The work slips between notions of authenticity, manipulation and irony, between affecting sincerity and effective design.
Misty Suite James Richards (UK/2009/6mins/video)
Richards uses the accumulation and reassembly of imagery as a devotional and elegiac process; the archetypes of the mixtape and of the souvenir create and demonstrate the obsession of the fan, the transformation of the mass archive into a personal one.
Greg Pope. 