CURATING

British Art after Britain

British Art Network Annual Conference, Kelvin Hall, Glasgow
24–25 November 2023

As questions about statehood, democracy and (dis)unity rise anew in the year of a Coronation, British Art after Britain reflects on the cultural legacy of devolution since the historic moment of the Good Friday Agreement and founding of parliaments in Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales. This two-day event is guest convened by Marcus Jack for the British Art Network (Tate & Paul Mellon Centre).

CINEMA DESPITE Festival: Reviewing artists’ film and video in Scotland

Tramway, Glasgow
1–3 September 2023

Featuring the contribution of twenty-nine artists, filmmakers and collectives working across a seventy year period, CINEMA DESPITE attempts to expand and trouble an underexposed history of artist’ film and video in Scotland. Organised into five transhistorical programmes, this one-off festival features film, video and sound by Maureen Blackwood, Roddy Buchanan, Enrico Cocozza, Henry Coombes, Anne-Marie Copestake, Cranhill Films, Malcolm Dickson, Graham Fagen, Luke Fowler, David Hall, Lesley Keen, Shaz Kerr, Tamara Krikorian, Mandy McIntosh, Lutz Mommartz, Ewan Morrison, Rosalind Nashashibi, Pratibha Parmar, Pictorial Heroes, Charlotte Prodger, Margaret Salmon, Jon Schorstein, SMITH/STEWART, Maud Sulter, Alia Syed, Tako Taal, Margaret Tait, Camara Taylor, and Ann Vance.

Film, video and animation made in Scotland between 1970 and 2020 by Lutz Mommartz, Lesley Keen, Alia Syed, Margaret Tait, Roddy Buchanan, Mandy McIntosh and Jasleen Kaur. Accompanied by a roundtable on the conditions of producing and exhibiting artists’ moving image in Scotland with speakers including Marcus Jack, Moira Jeffrey (Director, SCAN), Kitty Anderson (Director, LUX Scotland) and Michael Pattison (Co-Director, Alchemy Film & Arts), viewable here.

The Territorial Sea

Document Human Rights Film Festival 2018, Glasgow
1 December 2018

A programme of recent artists’ moving image featuring stories of struggle from sovereign waters. Works by Taus Makhacheva, Forensic Oceanography, and Francisco Rodríguez document tragic maritime passages, variously pointing to the cultures of spectacle, neglect, and cruelty which permit ongoing catastrophe.

Two films by Karen Russo and Patrick Hough which centre the re-enactment of mythologised landscapes by modernist campaigns.

An installation of Margaret Tait’s silent films which study the interiors and exteriors connected to her life and travels in Kirkwall, Edinburgh and Rome.

Visualising the return of nature and the disappearance of the body, this programme excavates the ruins of modernity: its architectures, colonial past, and enduring psychic residues. Films by Matthias Müller, Jon Schorstein, Emily Richardson, Fern Silva, Ben Rivers and Jorge Jácome. Performance by Michelle Hannah. Text commission from Simone Hutchinson, founder of Hedera Felix Press.

Life for social groups on the margins in three videos spanning forty years by James O’Brien, Deborah Stratman and Liz Rosenfeld.

Screening of Amie Siegel’s feature-length visual essay DDR/DDR (2008) with an introduction from Professor Laura Bradley, Chair of German and Theatre at the University of Edinburgh.

A programme about soft bodies in hard places, film, video and text works by Klaus vom Bruch, Christoph Girardet & Matthias Müller, Tessa Lynch, Amie Siegel and Fern Silva surveil the eerie control of urban life.

The first giallo film directed by Italian horror pioneer Dario Argento, preceded by a 16mm short by artist-filmmaker Emily Richardson. The screening was accompanied by a limited edition print made in collaboration with writer and editor Denise Bonnetti.

Films by artists Deborah Stratman, Yuri Pattison, Morwenna Kearsley, Emily Richardson and Jon Schorstein describe a reconstituted form of eeriness embedded within our metropolitan sites of work and leisure that purport to offer security, individualism and hermetic living.

The first comprehensive survey of Düsseldorf-based experimental filmmaker Lutz Mommartz in the UK, including an introduction from Marcus Jack, a newly commissioned performance responding to the archive from Berlin and Glasgow-based artist Carrie Skinner, Q&A with filmmaker Lutz Mommartz, and accompanied by a limited-edition print newspaper.

A screening programme installed in public space during Skye Live 2016. Archival films and recent moving image by Scottish Educational Film Association (SEFA), Nick Hand, Oliver Mezger, Margaret Salmon, Margaret Tait and Robin Haig were framed within the two definitions of the Gaelic term saothair: labour or toil—particularly of the hand—and the tidal causeway—natural paths which disappear and return in cycles. Accompanied by a new publication including contributions from Marcus Jack, Finola Scott, Sarah Browne, Sarah Neely, Margaret Salmon and Margaret Tait.

Artists’ films which transgress the dominant narrative form, bending, rearranging and rewriting the record, including work by Dorine Aguerre, Miles Joseph, Lucie Rachel, Jane Topping and Josie Rae Turnbull. Screened outdoors, from the back of a van. Accompanied by a new publication including contributions from Marcus Jack, Denise Bonetti, Jane Topping and Stephen Nelson.

Three films by Jen Martin, Chris Bowman and Andy Mackinnon which adopt poetic techniques to trace changing rhythms across the self, the city and further afield. Screened outdoors, from the back of a van.

Moving image works by Caroline Campbell, Common Culture, Dennis & Debbie Club, Jean-Baptiste Maitre and Will Kendrick which negotiate the adventure of consumption today, in the era of the experience economy. Screened outdoors, from the back of a van. Accompanied by a new publication featuring fiction and essay writing, photography and digital images, with contributions from Marcus Jack, Ewan Morrison, Graham Ramsay, Common Culture, Bram E. Gieben, Lucy Sykes, Dennis & Debbie Club and Will Kendrick.

Black Mountain College was a progressive liberal arts college, active between 1933 and 1957. This exhibition revisited its experimental practices and legacy through Post-War American prints from The Hunterian’s permanent collection, including Josef Albers, John Cage, Willem de Kooning, Robert Motherwell, and Ossip Zadkine, alongside new work by contemporary practitioners Raydale Dower, G.O.D.S. and Ciara Phillips.