New Work UK: IN MEDIA RES

Anthony Gross • Francis Lamb • Lindsay Seers • Plastique Fantastique (David Burrows and Simon O’Sullivan) • Tai Shani • Curated by Jen Wu

New Work UK is a LUX/ Whitechapel collaboration showcasing the best new British artists' film and video, each event is programmed and presented by a different guest curator. 

Thursday 12th June 7.30pm, £5
Whitechapel
Angel Alley Entrance
80 - 82 Whitechapel High Street
London, E1 7QX

The artists selected inhabit cinema's simultaneous realms of past, present, and future, constructing it in media res. Echoes of structuralist film pervade through an embodied formalism, absorbing and speaking our contemporary condition.  Through diverse approaches, these artists remap cinematic space, becoming and disintegrating into film’s elaborate fictions.

What fascinates me about these works and practices is the generative capacity they possess.  The sensibilities they convey and the means by which they are articulated present something that feels new – perhaps precisely in the way they critique, both directly and indirectly, that very principle within contemporary art practice and the ways by which we situate ourselves.

Anthony Gross, THE NEW MUSEUM, 2008.  5 min.  15 sec.  15 sec.  15 sec.
“Kurt Schwitters spoke of ‘crystalline palaces of socialism’; what if these places now exist but are instead.... luxury objects.”

Opening with – and interspersed throughout the programme – are scenes from Anthony Gross’ The New Museum. Using lo-fi computer animation techniques, The New Museum is assembled of rapidly produced fragments – movements that occur in repetition yet are assembled in an almost expressionistic manner to create something akin to a conventional cinematic structure.  The mistakes in rendering have been deliberately left in to create avatars with anxious psychologies whilst the loop, amplified through minimal techno, is held on the edge of rational form, aware of its own structure yet also functioning as a fully immersive genre.

Gross lives and works in London.  He has exhibited internationally including solo shows at Platform for Art Piccadilly, M-Projects (Paris), and the Economist; and group shows as part of the Guangzhou Triennale, MOCA Shanghai, Sharjah Biennale, and Earl Lu Gallery Singapore.

Francis Lamb, HOUSE TAKEN OVER, 2005.  6 min
Isolating frames and fragments from cinema’s seemingly infinite archive, Francis Lamb assembles reconfigured mindscapes of potentiality. Stripped away not only from a narrative sequential context, but also of sound and figures, the de-layering of the cinematic image activates its latent discursive realms. House Taken Over is titled after a short story by Julio Cortazar and is a montage of static shots from various art house films of the seventies. Leading the viewer through a series of atmospheric interiors whose inhabitants are always beyond the frame, the piece focuses instead on the life of these spaces before the actors have come on, or once they've exited.

Lamb lives and works in London. Previous exhibitions include International Biennale of Contemporary Art (Prague), Biennale! Artists Film & Video (London, Berlin, Shanghai, Beijing, Chengdu), Out of Darkness (touring UK), East International, and New Contemporaries. He lectures at Lincoln School of Art & Design and was a Wingate Scholar at the British School of Rome.

Lindsay Seers, INTERMISSION, 2007.  11 min.
Giving form to the complex relations of perception and production inherent in photographic representation, Lindsay Seers has been producing a body of work of dissolution into the medium. From being a camera to becoming a projector, Intermission describes her interstitial stage of transformation through a state of ventriloquism. An act of double alienation, theatre director Steve Pearl narrates this stage of her life and practice – itself expressed through ventriloquist’s dummies. Although told with a certain degree of oddball humour, what lingers is the continual inability of the medium to coincide with its subject as personal biography, memory, social history, and artistic practice become intertwined in a format akin to television documentary.

Seers lives and works in London.  Her recent solo exhibitions include Smart Project Space (Amsterdam), The Collection (Lincoln), Grundy Gallery (Blackpool), Gasworks (London), and performances at Aspex Gallery (Portsmouth), Witte de With (Rotterdam), Tou Scene (Stavanger), HKS (Bergen) and Project Theatre (Dublin); group shows include The Auditorium (Rome), White Box (New York), and UBS Openings (Tate Modern).  She lectures in Fine Art (MA) at Goldsmiths, recently published Human Camera (2007), and was a Wingate Scholar at The British School of Rome.

Plastique Fantastique, THE CHYMICAL WEDDING, 2008.  15 min.
Plastique Fantastique is a collaboration between David Burrows and Simon O’Sullivan - a 'mythopoetic fiction’ engaged with investigations of aesthetics, the sacred, and politics.  Ideologies escape narrative to become experiential form, enacted in performances, comics, texts, assemblages and shrines. The Chymical Wedding was a parade and ritual performed at Tate Britain that looked back to the custom of ‘mumming’. Traditionally, ‘mummers’ would wander the country, drunk and in masks, and gatecrash New Year festivities to perform a play. Drawing also upon Sascha Masoch and John Dee, The Chymical Wedding forms part of their ongoing communiqués.

Plastique Fantastique are based in London.  Future events will take place at the Outpost Gallery, Norwich in October and at the Royal Academy as part of their upcoming contemporary art season this fall.  See www.plastiquefantastique.org for further details and archive of projects.

Tai Shani, THEE KITTY GENOVESE, 2008.  26 min.
The films and performances of Tai Shani create evocative cosmologies of interconnected being.  Fantastical and dreamlike, her work seeks out the moments of intensity underpinning the production and play of images both existent and to come.  In Thee Kitty Genovese, trauma becomes the precipitant for an unfettered cinema depicting emotional and psychological states, characters and scenarios.  Dressed in handmade costumes and props, the film is produced with an economy of expression that nevertheless continually teeters on the brink of ecstatic vision.

Tai Shani lives and works in London.  Recent exhibitions and performances include Empire and Daughter Isotope as part of the Institute of Psychoplasmics; Pillow Talk at Shunt, and Double A Side at ARTIS  Centre for Fine Art ‘s Hertogenbosch, Stedelijk Museum‘s Hertogenbosch.  She also writes and performs music as Cherry Mash Cherry.




IN MEDIA RES is curated by artist and curator Jen Wu.  Formerly Inspire Curatorial Fellow at the ICA, she is also co-director with Anthony Gross of temporarycontemporary.  Future curatorial projects include NIGHTCLUB at the ICA later this month, and Event Horizon as part of GSK Contemporary at the Royal Academy this autumn.