The MAB Film Exercise

The Awkward Scene

The MAB Film Exercise Mar - May 2010

A monthly screening and discussion group around artists' film and video in which invited curators present and discuss a programme (or single piece) of moving image work, addressing both the diverse potential for the form and a sense of the current urgency, social or political timeliness in the work (of both curator and artist).

Presented by Media Art Bath
www.mediaartbath.org.uk

The Awkward Scene

Andrea Büttner, Jos de Gruyter and Harald Thys, Laura Horelli

Curated by Richard Birkett, Curator, ICA

The Awkward Scene considers the methodologies and artifacts of moving image production in relation to the social experience of emotional connection and disconnection. The works screened depict the awkwardness inherent in the presence of the personal in the public realm; in differing ways they locate this sentiment as an active vector within the production of art and the social relations enacted through it.

Videos by Andrea Büttner, Laura Horelli, and Jos de Gruyter and Harald Thys function through distinct genres of documentary, the televisual, and the dramatic vignette. The artists use these familiar formats both as barriers and conduits to the individuals who form the subject of their works, including family members and a closed order of Carmelite nuns. At the centre of each work is the depiction of a creative ritual; invested with conspicuous levels of belief and symbolism these actions – and the filmmakers’ relationship to them – become unsettling and provocative.

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