Screening Literature

This DVD contains:
Light Reading, 1978, 20 min.
Pictures on Pink Paper, 1982, 35 min.
Cold Draft, 1988, 28 min.

Lis Rhodes has been at the forefront of British experimental filmmaking since the early 1970s. She studied at the North East London Polytechnic and the Royal College of Art. A strong formal aesthetic has been developed in her films, reflecting her involvement with the debates and practice which emerged from the London Filmmakers' Co-operative, where she was Cinema Curator 1975-6. Early 'expanded' works such as Light Music (1975) fused performance and multi-screen projection with an exploration of the visual qualities of sound. Her analysis of broader political and social questions can be traced to her later films, which combine formal rigour with a passionate critique of issues from nuclear power to domestic violence. As an active campaigner for women's rights, Rhodes was a founder member of Circles, the first women's artist film and video (1979) and was an Arts Advisor to the Greater London Council between 1982 and 1985. She lives and works in London and teaches at Slade School of Fine Art, University College, London.

The publication Actors & Extras appears following the exhibition of the same name at Argos. Five authors highlight the theme of characterisation from various angles. Georges Didi-Huberman’s contribution People exposed, People as Extras explores how cinema represents the masses. Sven Lütticken highlights the performance tradition in the visual arts in relation to the producing of subjectivity. On the basis of the classic cinema, in Figures of the Extra, Paul Willemsen composes a typology of the extra and subsequently gives attention to the aberrant status of the extra in modern cinema and contemporary art.

Thomas Trummer’s Volonté Générale. Extras in Film and Democracy questions the responsibility of the anonymous individual. With The Passing Actor: Sketch of a Renaissance Jean-Louis Comolli analyses how the concept of acting in a documentary has a different interpretation than in a fiction film. The last part of the publication describes the selected works in the exhibition.

Texts by: Clemens von Wedemeyer, João Onofre, Mark Lewis, Mike Figgis, Jeremy Deller, Irina Botea, Christian Jankowski, Aernout Mik, Krassimir Terziev, Julika Rudelius

Foundlings, a video film, was shot near Wexford, in the south east of Ireland where she grew up. This visual poem without a particular narrative and full of autobiographical elements is set at a very slowed down pace. Floating images and heavy voices are central to the associative strategy that is at work here. The images allow one to listen to a hypnotic voice, while at the same time allowing the eyes to wander... to daydream... to travel over drawn out time. The images are country images, images of repetitive calm, the kind of calm one finds between awake and asleep. The speed of the sea sets the pace, regular yet irregular. The images are inhabited by people who cannot speak. Who are busy doing nothing, except passing time. Silent brothers and sisters of the sea.

The soundsculpture Unsaid, a joint work by Orla Barry and Portuguese artist Rui Chafes (1964), is very opposite to the film. The film is full of open spaces and bright colours. The sculpture is black, closed and claustrophobic and on top of that it is housed in a narrow tower five meters tall. The visitor has to take place on a rather unconventional chair and put his head in a closed off sphere, surrounding himself by darkness and leaving him with his own heartbeat. A voice addresses the visitor directly on highly intimate terms. The seating is hard and uncomfortable. One has to be strong to experience this piece that is a perpetual struggle between body and mind.

At the occassion of Barry’s show argos editions published Foundlings, a combined artist book and catalogue that can be ordered through argos. The book includes a DVD.

Orla Barry (1969) is an artist who centres her practice on language, written and spoken. Her work is strongly poetic and lyrical, crossing a wide variety of media. Barry was born in Ireland, and the rhythm of her phraseology, the pictorial and narrative vernacular on which she draws, somehow evokes her homeland’s topography, climate and literary heritage. At argos the artist presented two new works.

A richly illustrated exploration of Sung Hwan Kim’s complex record of migrant stories, displacement and belonging, border-crossings and translation.

In A Record of Drifting Across the Sea (2017–), Sung Hwan Kim looks at histories of migration. The artist parses the traces –archival and bodily – left by undocumented Korean migrants who came to the US by way of Hawai’i at the turn of the twentieth century, and ponders over their impact on other migrant and indigenous communities. As an ongoing film and installation series, comprising two chapters and a third in progress, A Record unsettles the limits of the ‘one work’ with its distributive, open-ended and collaborative nature.

In this speculative inquiry, Janine Armin explores each chapter in Kim’s multi-layered work as a mycelial network of feelers entangling and extending the wider work in-process. Engaging history through embodiment, folklore and myth, as much as through archival material, Kim navigates and crosses the boundaries between displacement and belonging. Focusing on the artist’s attempt to escape from representation, Armin illuminates and attends to the different stories and non-sovereign ways of being together towards which his work points us.

This title is part of the One Work book series, which focuses on artworks that have significantly changed the way we understand art and its history.

This publication presents a survey of the work of Els Dietvorst from 2010 to 2014. This is also the period in which she left Brussels to live in a village on the south-east coast of Ireland, where she focused on projects such as The Black Lamb. The audio piece One was killed for beauty, another one was shot, the two others died naturally is included on an audio CD.

Els Dietvorst E.D. (2010–2014), Rolf Quaghebeur, Eva Wittocx, Katleen Weyts, Els Dietvorst, Brussels, 2014.