Mahu Cinema - June Saturday 13th 2015
at the Hardy Tree gallery - 7pm - Free Entry www.hardytreegallery.com 119 Pancras Road. London, UK. NW1 1UN0
email steven@sjfowlerpoetry.com for further details
"Poetry has been in dialogue with film since the origins of cinema, driving and challenging its theories from Man Ray and Surrealism or Dziga Vertov and Eisenstein through to later incarnations of the avant-garde, influencing narrative cinema and proliferating today with accessible online platforms and affordable means of production. Whether packaged as filmpoem, film poetry, the poetics of film, cinepoetry, video art (or tangled in distinguishing between the various labels) there is undoubtedly a growing popularity for this crossing of mediums. However, what is it that saves such collaborative or merging experiments from stale or illustrative cliches? How can an exchange between film and poetry be advanced? What is it that, if at all, excites or challenges us in this practice?" - Co-curator Dave Spittle.
7.30pm - an introduction by Dave Spittle
7.45pm - Main programme
1) Alice Lyons - 'The Polish Language' (8:22)
2) David Kelly &Joshua Alexander - 'Warming' (6:43)
3) Marc Neys (Steve Ronnie) /Swoon - 'If Grief were to Disappear' (4:20)
4) Lila Matsumoto & Adam Butcher - (3:38)
5) SJ Fowler & Joshua Alexander - 'Animal Drum' (6:05)
6) Chiara Ambrosio - A Walk Through Wooda (10:36)
7) Vessela Dantcheva - 'Anna Blume' (10:50)
8) Ed Atkins - 'Warm, Warm, Warm Spring Mouths' (2:47)
9) Abigail Child - 'Mercy' (10:14)
We are very excited to confirm a screening of the final film, Mercy (1989), from Abigail Child’s influential 7 part-sequence Is This What You Were Born For? Abigail Child is an American filmmaker and poet whose six books and over thirty film and video works have continued to invigorate and innovate the intersections between language and cinema for the past 30 years. Emerging alongside the Language poets in the 70s, her writing and film has gone on to advance concepts of montage, explore inspired (re)articulations of found material, and interrogate the frenzied, confused, humorous and frightening politics of representation through a restless play between sound, image, language and film. A collection of writings by various authors on Is This What You Were Born For?, including a DVD of the film series, was published in 2011. One of the contributed essays was by the UK poet and filmmaker Redell Olsen, whose own exciting and original contributions to this unpredictable space between poetry and film, take on and respond to aspects of Child’s reaching influence.
The programme will also now be featuring an enigmatic and characteristically intelligent extract from Ed Atkins’ 2013 project Warm, Warm, Warm Spring Mouths. Ed Atkins is a British video artist whose work negotiates a witty, unsettling and charged atmosphere around developments in digital media. Through the under-explored connotations of High Definition visual technology his video art illuminates a changing expression of the body, its surface, depth and expression – mediated through haunted and often blackly comic monologues. In addition to his many accolades as an exciting and rising figure in video art, in November 2012 he was one of eight recipients of the Paul Hamlyn Award.
Followed by a screening of Drawing Breath (excerpt)
Film makers: Anna Cady and Pauline Thomas
Curators of interpretations: Anna Cady and Jenny Chamarette
'Elemental Dialogues' is a practice-led research project. This work, 'Drawing Breath', explores what happens when the short film AIR is handed over to a network of poets /writers, sound artists/musicians, and scholars, with all information regarding the original intention of the film makers withheld. Each contributor then produces an interpretation of AIR, through their own diverse practice. These interpretations are then re-embedded into the film, creating new, pluridisciplinary artworks, each of which tells a different and sometimes radically unexpected story. These interpretations have been curated into one continuous film: 'Drawing Breath'
Poets included in this excerpt from the interpretations: Briony Bennett, Tami Haaland, SJ Fowler, Steve Emerson, a.rawlings, Sachiko Murakami.
Visit www.talkthinkmake.wordpress.com for more information about the project and the artists.
about Mahu
A solo exhibition by SJ Fowler www.stevenjfowler.com/mahu
A novel onto gallery walls. A novel written without prelude or revision. A novel written in black ink on white walls. A novel in words that veers into neologisms. A novel in language that veers into abstract symbols. An asemic novel. A novel of twenty-one days, before it is stripped, chopped, framed, never to be reunited again.
Hardy Tree Gallery is a London based art gallery. The gallery promotes the work of emerging visual artists, photographers and performance artists. Co-founders Cameron Maxwell and Amalie Russell, aim to create a space which pushes boundaries and gives artists the freedom to bring their visions to life.
Hardy Tree Gallery is located next to St. Pancras station. The name Hardy Tree comes from a tree in the St. Pancras churchyard. Before turning to writing full time, Thomas Hardy worked as an architect apprentice and in the 1860’s was commissioned to dismantle tombs in the churchyard to allow the new St. Pancras train tracks to pass through. Rather than discard the many gravestones, Hardy placed them around a tree.
The tree, which has grown amongst the gravestones, represents growth, memories and the history of the area.
For more info, please contact info@hardytreegallery.com