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Screenings and performances from: Ed Atkins / Adam Broomberg & Oliver Chanarin / Uriel Orlow / Khalil Joreige & Joana Hadjithomas / Gail Pickering / Mark Aerial Waller


With: Bridget Crone

FILM EXERCISE presents a weekend of screenings and performances around the question: What can the image do? Posed as both a provocation and a question for future action, FILM EXERCISE has invited artists and theorists to respond to questions of the image’s role and efficacy in relation to political representation and action, as well as questions surrounding the affective capacities of the image today.

Echoing the Lebanese filmmaker, Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige’s question, “what can cinema do?” in connection with their film, Je Veux Voir (2008), which questions the capacity for film to show the aftermath of war, the FILM EXERCISE symposium is an opportunity to come together for a weekend of discussing the languages, actions and future possibilities for the image.

Following FILM EXERCISE’s regular format of screening and active conversation in equal measure, and adding special performances and events, we have invited artists and film-makers including Ed Atkins, Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin, Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, Gail Pickering and Mark Aerial Waller to address questions regarding the qualities, capacities, limits and transmissions of images. In short, we posed to them the question: “What can the image do?”

Symposium curated by Bridget Crone and Al Cameron

The full programme details are available HERE.

Fri 19 October

6.30pm
Ed Atkins

Ed Atkins lives and works in London. Recent solo projects include Tate Britain (2011), Cabinet Gallery (2011), both London, and Bonn Kunstverein (2012); recent group exhibitions include ‘A Dying Artist’, ICA, London (2011), ‘Time Again’, Sculpture Center, New York (2011), ‘An Echo Button’, with James Richards and Haroon Mirza, for Performa 2011, New York, and ‘Weighted Words’ at 176, London (2012). He was shortlisted for the Jarman Award, 2011 and is a winner of the inaugural ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ Film and Video Umbrella film commission (2012). He will present solo projects at Isabella Bortolozzi Galerie, Berlin, Temple Bar Gallery, Dublin and MoMA PS1, New York in the coming months, and his exhibition ‘Us Dead Talk Love’ runs at the Chisenhale Gallery from 21 September until 11 November 2012.

Sat 20 October

2pm
Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin –
The Birth (of the image) of a Nation: Kuxa Kanema

Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin are artists living and working in London. Their latest book War Primer 2 is published by MACK (2011). Broomberg and Chanarin teach at the Zurich University of the Arts and are Visiting Fellows at the University of the Arts London. Their work is represented in major public and private collections including Tate Modern, the Stedelijk Museum, Victoria and Albert Museum, International Center of Photography, Musee de l’Elysee, Shpilman Institute for Photography and Saatchi Gallery.

4pm
Uriel Orlow – Unmade Film: The Reconnaissance (performance)

Uriel Orlow is a London-based artist and senior research fellow at the University of Westminster. Solo exhibitions in 2012 include Oslo Kunstforening, Prefix ICA Toronto, Saint Gervais Geneva, ACAF Alexandria, Centre PasquArt Biel. Recent biennials include ‘The Deep of the Modern’, Manifesta 9, Belgium; ‘Chewing the Scenery’ Swiss off-site Pavilion 54th Venice Biennale; ‘Essays in Geopoetics’, 8th Mercosul Biennial, Brazil, ‘Farewell to Postcolonialism’, 3rd Guangzhou Triennial, as well as exhibitions and screenings at Tate Modern, London, Jewish Museum New York, Argos Brussels, Kunsthalle Budapest, Oberhausen Short Film Festival, South African National Gallery Cape Town, Centre d’Art Contemporain Geneva, Gasworks, ICA and Whitechapel Gallery, London.

5pm
Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige

Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige are Lebanese filmmakers and artists. Their last feature film Je veux voir (I want to see), starring Catherine Deneuve and Rabih Mroué, premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 2008 in the Un Certain Regard section and was granted the Best Singular Film Award by the French Syndicate of Cinema Critics that year. Hadjithomas and Joreige have created numerous photographic and video installations that have been shown in many museums, biennials and art centres around the world. Their last project is about the Lebanese space programme, which include several artistic installations and the long feature documentary, The Lebanese Rocket Society, the strange tale of the Lebanese space race.

7.30pm
Gail Pickering – Not Yet No Longer (performance)

Gail Pickering is a London based artist whose work can be seen as a layering of performed fictions, constructed and sourced through specific sites as well as historical and political events. Her performance and video works often function as social proposals that employ an unfolding process of collaboration, working variously with both amateur and professional actors, musicians and speakers. Not Yet, No Longer is part of the series of unique live events ‘Sixty Six Signs of Neon’ which was recently included in British Art Show 7 at Hayward Gallery. Her video and performance works have been shown at Tate Modern, Arnolfini and South London Gallery.

9pm
Mark Aerial Waller / The Wayward Canon – Horrror Yoga

Mark Aerial Waller is an artist working in video, sculpture, drawing and event based practices, based in London. He produces interdisciplinary, cinematic time travelogues that refute any predictable balance between our romance for the ancient past and our fetish for a streamlined future. Waller defies conventional screening formats, integrating sculptural objects and live performances for an experience of cinema defined in spatial and situational terms. He is also the founder of The Wayward Canon, a platform for event-based interventions in cinematic practices. At this closing event for the Film Exercise Symposium, he asks, what is the relation between yoga, boundary theory and the film Dead of Night?