2015.4.4（Sat）

19:00-21:30

Hold Your Ground

The Call of Mist – Redux

Personal Responsibility

Choir (Parts 1 & 2)

Come to the Edge

O Come all ye Faithfull

Looking So Hard At Something It Distorts Or Becomes Obscured (Not Blacking Out, Just Turning The Lights Off )

Death Mask 2: The Scent

The Pips

The Lion and The Unicorn

It, heat, hit

Sludge Mainfesto

Dad's Stick

The Magic Know-How

Origin of the Species

Edgeland Mutter

Dark Glass

Lester

Middle Sea

2015.4.5（Sun）

15:00-18:30 Screening and Discussion

Hold Your Ground

The Call of Mist – Redux

Personal Responsibility

Choir (Parts 1 & 2)

Come to the Edge

O Come all ye Faithfull

Looking So Hard At Something It Distorts Or Becomes Obscured (Not Blacking Out, Just Turning The Lights Off )

Death Mask 2: The Scent

The Pips

The Lion and The Unicorn

It, heat, hit

Sludge Mainfesto

Dad's Stick

The Magic Know-How

Origin of the Species

Edgeland Mutter

Dark Glass

Lester

Middle Sea

2015.4.11（Sat）

19:00-21:30

Hold Your Ground

The Call of Mist – Redux

Personal Responsibility

Choir (Parts 1 & 2)

Come to the Edge

O Come all ye Faithfull

Looking So Hard At Something It Distorts Or Becomes Obscured (Not Blacking Out, Just Turning The Lights Off )

Death Mask 2: The Scent

The Pips

The Lion and The Unicorn

It, heat, hit

Sludge Mainfesto

Dad's Stick

The Magic Know-How

Origin of the Species

Edgeland Mutter

Dark Glass

Lester

Middle Sea

Hold Your Ground, 2012, 7′47″, shortlisted in 2012

Hold Your Ground is a companion piece to a larger film work by Karen Mirza and Brad Butler, Deep State, scripted in conjunction with renowned author China Miéville. Inspired by the events of the Arab Spring, and triggered by the artists’ discovery in Cairo of a pamphlet of instructions for pro-democracy demonstrators called ‘How to protest intelligently’, the piece dissects the ‘semantics’ of the crowd, and the resulting performative Speech

Act. Conceived for a site at Canary Wharf this work calls forth the struggle to turn ‘fugitive sounds’ into speech addressing an audience predominantly in transit.

Deep State and Hold Your Ground are commissioned by Film and Video Umbrella. Funded by Arts Council England and London Councils.

The Call of Mist – Redux, 2012, 13′18″, shortlisted in 2014

Set on a remote Scottish island, The Call of Mist is an elegy to Akomfrah’s late mother and a vivid meditation on death, memory and cloning. Initially commissioned in 1998 for the BBC, the re-edited version incorporates additional images that were removed in the television version recovering his original conception.

A Smoking Dogs Films Production.

An Exchange for Fire: Personal Responsibility, 2013, 3′3″, HD video, sound

Personal Responsibility is one of five short films comprising An Exchange for Fire. The series brings together footage shot in Greece during 2012 with texts by Clinical Wasteman that redefine the terminology of the current global financial crisis. Each episode traverses moments from the history of money, the creation of the modern fiscal state, and contemporary life under capitalist restructuring.

Choir, 2011, 9′36″, HD video, sound

In this video, Elizabeth Price plays on the multiple meanings of the word ‘choir’, describing both an ensemble of singers but also an area of a church and the term ‘quire’ within bookbinding. Concerned with processes of assembly, Choir brings together disparate bodies of digital film and photography and archival technologies into dissonant concert. Part 1 employs archival 19th and 20th-century photography featuring the ecclesiastical architecture and furnishings of the choir and is organised to simulate the construction of an auditorium within the video. Part 2 draws upon informal internet archives of musical performance, such as YouTube, and features the coordinated gestures and dancing of singers and backing singers. Many different performances are convened in the edit, to generate a single sardonic and intoxicated dance. It features a new musical soundtrack: a distorted cacophony of appropriated pop melody.

Come to the Edge, 2003, 1′50″, SD video, sound

Come to the Edge uses a recording of the well-loved British poet Christopher Logue reciting a poem he wrote in 1968. The poem is combined with video footage shot in a sixth-form common room, in which a good-humored scene is suddenly transformed into something more sinister as the group of schoolboys enact a ritual humiliation upon a seemingly older, mustachioed boy.

O come all ye faithful, 2007, 56 sec, SD video, sound

O come all ye faithful juxtaposes a hopeful poem by Logue with a disparaging internal monologue. The artist creates a stark contrast between the found footage of Logue’s poetry reading and the terse background banter – an overlay of streaming obscenities that seem to imply Logue’s own self-doubt. The result is a performance that feels at once cohesive and schizophrenic.

Looking So Hard at Something It Distorts or Becomes Obscured (Not Blacking Out, Just Turning the Lights Off), 2011, 16′16″, SD video, sound

“In [Looking So Hard…] there are really distinct periods of suspense where I’m trying to stretch time. For example, there’s a stuck loop of a cigarette dropping to the floor. It’s a heady, atmospheric moment that cuts back on itself over and over, and as your mind wanders you find yourself focusing on different part of the passage: image, sound, lighting, or the instance of the cut. These tight loops can really create a situation where a fragment feels like it is being turned over in the light and inspected from different angles.” --James Richards

Continually reworking material from previous installations and videos, James Richards reroutes it from its initial use, examining the cultural and emotional resonances in ever-evolving scenarios.

Commissioned by Chisenhale Gallery, London.

Death Mask II: The Scent, 2010, 8′42″, HD video, sound

Death Mask II: The Scent forms part of a project conceived as a paean for cadavers. It is shot using high-definition digital video, and reflects on the medium’s (im)material aspect – how close can representations of matter get to being the real thing? The film’s subject emits a stink without a source. Fruit spoils and is coated with chroma key paint as ink, blood, etc.; objects resonate and unfurl at the touch of a particular frequency; the back of a head appears as the most opaque thing in the world.

The Pips, 2011, 3′37″, 16 mm black and white film transferred to HD video, silent

The Pips shows British champion gymnast Frankie Jones performing a ribbon routine that ends with her body falling apart into a scattered collection of limbs. Her physical deterioration is the effect of digital post-production: the gymnast’s body disappears when the film is transferred to digital video. The work makes subtle reference to the song “Help Me Make It Through the Night” (1970) by Gladys Knight & The Pips, which begins with the lyric “take the ribbon from my hair.”

The Lion and The Unicorn, 2012, 11′30″, HD video, sound

The Lion and The Unicorn is a short film inspired by the heraldic symbols found on the Royal Coat of Arms of the United Kingdom: the lion (representing England) and the unicorn (representing Scotland). The film uses these symbols of both alliance and opposition to explore the myriad, convoluted, and often contradictory constructions of cultural identity that feed into definitions of what it means to be Scottish and part of the Union with England. The work reflects on the absurd nature of these symbols and their potential as signifiers to be unpacked and imbued with a variety of incongruous meanings.

Commissioned by Edinburgh Printmakers for Year of Creative Scotland 2012.

It, Heat, Hit, 2010, 7′22″, SD video, sound

Laure Prouvost draws on the narrative tradition within film to seduce and entertain, yet implied storylines are undermined by juxtapositions of text and image that introduce a surreal dimension to the viewing experience. It, Heat, Hit constructs and propels an inferred story through a fast-moving sequence of written commentary and excerpts of everyday incidents and pictures. The video is a sensory overload, featuring direct address, on-screen text, fast cuts, surround sound and narrative disruption – all delivered with humor. Statements of love and implied violence follow images such as a swimming frog or a snowy street scene. These are intercut with disconnected images, close-ups of flowers, body parts or food. The growing intensity of the film is reinforced by the rhythm of a drum, which accompanies snatches of music and speech.

Sludge Manifesto, 2011, 1′29″, HD video, sound

“Sludge Manifesto is part of a larger body of work. It has in part to do with considering an idea of a materialism of digital technology, and this led to the mining of rare earth metals. At the heart of many digital machines there are precious metals that are mined from the ground, so I was thinking about these and myths of the mine. These blobs of clay or golems are like the counterpoint to these rare earths. In this video we see a radicalised incarnation.” --Benedict Drew

Dad’s Stick, 2012, 5′9″, HD video, sound

“Dad’s Stick features three well-used objects that my father showed me shortly before he died. Two of these were so steeped in history that their original forms and functions were almost completely obscured. The third object seemed to be instantly recognisable, but it turned out to be something else entirely.” --John Smith

Drawing on autobiographical material, Smith explores the manipulative power of cinema. He plays on the gaps between language and visual representation, abstraction and literal meaning, personal memory and outside assessment – finding contradictions to be a source of humor and an insight into character.

Commissioned by Frieze Foundation for Frieze Film.

The Magic Know-How, 2013, 9′22″, HD video, sound

The Magic Know-How is a composition of acts, each section being denoted by repeated interludes of shapes in water. The piece combines footage from everyday life and filmed manipulation of scans on a computer screen with animation of photographic imagery to push a personal record of lived experience into an extra-mundane dimension. A celebratory work, the soundtrack was produced in collaboration with musician Andrew Spence of the band NYPC (New Young Pony Club). Beginning with swooshing paintbrush strokes, the piece moves through six parts, climaxing with Distortion Site, an audio digital color-field finale.

Origin of the Species, 2008, 15′39″, 16 mm film transferred to HD, sound

Origin of the Species began as a portrait of S, a 75-year- old man living in a remote part of Inverness-shire. S has been obsessed with Charles Darwin’s works for much of his life. Since a child, he has wondered at life on Earth and though he never became an academic, found in Darwin many answers to his questions. The film imagery concentrates on the mysterious geography of his world: his garden – from the miniature to the grand; the contraptions and inventions he has made; the isolated patch of land where he built his house after a life of travelling and working around the world. The soundtrack hears S discussing life on Earth, from the beginnings of the world to an uncertain future.

Edgeland Mutter, 2009, 4′16″, Super 8 and 16 mm film transferred to SD video and SD video, sound

“Edgeland Mutter attempts to invoke a sense of the past via the here and now. Drawing on my own extensive Super 8 archive and a growing body of MiniDV footage, the film attempts to portray a fragmented and nostalgic view of a part of the world that has proved vital to the very fabric of my existence. Amongst the sonic flotsam and jetsam lie littoral truths, half-truths and coastal myths. Both melancholic and absurd, the ‘coastcard’ is a confusing missive from a place of hope. It is a reminiscence and flawed celebration. Hastings as a place where both memories and people are pulled towards the sea in a strange state of ‘reverse evolution.” --Andrew Kötting

Edgeland Mutter was shot on Super 8 and MiniDV along the shore of the English south coast between St-Leonards-on-Sea and Hastings, with voiceover by psychogeographer Iain Sinclair.

Dark Glass, 2006, 8′47″, SD video (shot on a mobile phone), sound

A psychological micro-drama that moves from the sanctuary of a domestic garden to the half-remembered shadows of a house, Clio Barnard’s Dark Glass peers back into a semi-veiled interior world of fraught, ambivalent memories. Shot on a mobile phone camera to accentuate a feeling of intimacy and immediacy, the flickering nature of the footage also lends the film an uncanny, otherworldly quality.

Commissioned by Film and Video Umbrella as part of ‘Single Shot’. Funded by Arts Council England and the UK Film Council’s New Cinema Fund.

Lester, 2009, 3′25″, 16 mm film transferred to SD video, sound

As the 2008 Jarman Award winner, Luke Fowler was commissioned to make four short films for the 3 Minute Wonder documentary slot on Channel 4, premiering in April 2009. Anna, Helen, David and Lester are a series of portraits of four diverse individuals brought together through a shared residence – four flats in a Victorian tenement in the West End of Glasgow. Lester was scored by Los Angeles-based cellist, Charles Curtis.

MiddleSea, 2008, 15′55″, super 16 mm film transferred to HD video, sound

The sea is the space that connects and separates communities; it is the crossing point between utopias and forced or voluntary exile. In MiddleSea, Zineb Sedira uses the Mediterranean Sea as a frame of reference and a metaphor for existence, a link between interior space and the infinite expanse of water – threatening, abusive, sublime in its uncontrollable power. Throughout this abstract narrative, a solitary human being faces the continuous circulation of water and the repetitive rise and fall of giant waves.

Elizabeth Price

Elizabeth Price (b. 1966) studied at the Ruskin School of Art, Oxford and the Royal College of Art, London. She makes narrative videos that incorporate live action, motion graphics, and sound and are concerned with the material culture of our recent past – how it remains in our collective cultural imagination and resides in our collective cultural unconscious.

Price won the 2012 Turner Prize for her solo exhibition “Here” at BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead. She was the Arts Council England Helen Chadwick Fellow at the University of Oxford and British School at Rome (2010–11) having exhibited User Group Disco (2009) as part of the British Art Show 7 (2010). In 2010 she was commissioned to make The Tent by Frieze Foundation and Channel 4 for Frieze Projects 2010.She is based in London.

Venus Lau

Venus Lau is a curator and writer based in Beijing. After working as an art writer and project curator, she works actively in various cultural spheres across greater China, pursuing multidisciplinary experimentation with potential and emergent cultural productions in the region, while initiating discourses between Chinese art and the cultural structures in other countries. She won the CCAA (Chinese Contemporary Art Award) Jury’s Pick with her proposal actively rethinking on the strategies of institutional critique in China, while exploring the linkage between object-oriented ontology in art. She was the chairman of Society for Experimental Cultural Production, a non-profit organization focusing on new possibilities of cultural productions. Venus Lau is currently working as the consulting curator at UCCA

British Council

The British Council is the UK’s international organisation for cultural relations and educational opportunities. We create international opportunities for the people of the UK and other countries and build trust between them worldwide.

We work in more than 100 countries and our 7,000 staff – including 2,000 teachers – work with thousands of professionals and policy makers and millions of young people every year by teaching English, sharing the arts and delivering education and society programmes.

We are a UK charity governed by Royal Charter. A core publically-funded grant provides less than 25 per cent of our turnover which last year was £781 million. The rest of our revenues are earned from services which customers around the world pay for, through education and development contracts and from partnerships with public and private organisations. All our work is in pursuit of our charitable purpose and supports prosperity and security for the UK and globally.

We operate as the Cultural and Education Section of the British Embassy in Beijing and Cultural and Education Section of the British Consulate-General in Shanghai, Guangzhou and Chongqing. Our Exams work across China operates as a Wholly Foreign Owned Enterprise.

2015 UK-China Year of Cultural Exchange

2015 sees the first ever UK-China Year of Cultural Exchange – showcasing the very best of UK culture in China and Chinese culture in the UK.

A unique opportunity to further deepen and strengthen the UK’s existing relationship with China across the arts and creative industries, the 2015 UK-China Year of Cultural Exchange will build on our long and shared rich cultural histories, and seek to inspire what this creative partnership means in the 21st Century.

The Year comprises of two ‘seasons’ of culture – a UK season in China in the first half of 2015 and a China season in the UK in the second half of 2015.

The UK season in China sees a contemporary, adventurous, multi-disciplinary and innovative programme of around 30 projects across China. Through these projects, and supporting dialogues and visits between professionals, the Year showcases the diversity and excitement of the UK's creative, cultural sector and of our many fine artists. This is supported by a significant digital offering, including on social media and a new digital arts platform, for showcasing and for connecting all those interested in two cultures, and how the UK and China work together.