Programme

MEMORY AWAKE
3 November - 1 December 2011


Further information on the films and the artists



PART I
3 -16 November

The Fog Thicker
2010 6mins20sec
Nelson Bourrec Carter
Three women set out on a quest to find a long lost house. And as they drive, carried by the voice of an overpowering preacher, they eventually get lost in a rather pleasant fog. The car becomes a place of reflection, the road trip a pretext for introspection, whereas the somehow unreachable outside nourishes the nostalgia of unknown times. They are like ghosts driving through the world of the living.

Through the use of photography and video, Bourrec Carter questions the link between personal and collective memory, and its role in making the self. Between reality and the fantasized landscape, the characters gently glide from seductive nostalgias to heavy and mute atmospheres.

French-American, born 1988
Lives and work in Paris
Graduated from the Nantes Superior School of Fine Arts 2010
http://www.nelsonbourreccarter.com/

Eric
2010 13mins40sec
Rebecca Davies
Eric documents a funeral. It begins in Skegness, where Eric passes away and ends in Coventry, where he is cremated. The video observes the context of a funeral for a loved one; the story travelling from Eric's last year in a care home, to picking his coffin in the funeral parlour, and the reception at a working men's club.

Rebecca Davies is a video maker and illustrator. Her work is about people and places. She studies places that are of interest to her, that have a 'chequered' past, and as a result are undergoing some form of regeneration. In an attempt to preserve these characterful locations, Rebecca documents them. This takes the form of sound recording, illustration and video work. Past and ongoing projects include Dungeness, The Elephant and Castle Shopping Centre and Coney Island.

Graduated from the Royal College of Art where she specialised in moving image and sound.
In 2010 she won the Sheila Robinson Prize for Drawing and was nominated for the Helen Hamlyn Design Award.
Her video Eric has been screened at the BFI and was shortlisted for the Salon Video Prize in 2011.

Point Of Audition
2009 13mins42sec
Allan Hughes
Point Of Audition uses transcriptions of Jane Fonda’s broadcasts on Radio Hanoi from the summer of 1972. Fonda lent her support to the anti-war movement by speaking out against the United States’ involvement in Vietnam, and the policies of President Nixon’s administration. The broadcasts were directed primarily towards U.S. soldiers based in Vietnam. They were subsequently investigated by the U.S. Congress House of Representatives for their effect in undermining confidence amongst soldiers on active duty.
Point Of Audition presents a synchronised vocal performance of extracts from the Radio Hanoi transcripts, set in a reconstruction of a scene from the film Klute, in which Fonda played the central role.

In making his films, Alan Hughes deconstructs existing material and re-presents and re-fashions it. This process, which is used by many artists, is often referred to as remediation. Hughes has touched on many subjects which have included the decommissioned British Army listening post at Black Mountain in Belfast, and the erased portions of Richard Nixon's Watergate Tapes.

In 2011 his work was included in Rencontres Internationales at the Haus Der Kulturen Der Welt in Berlin, Pompidou Centre in Paris & the Filmoteca Espanol in Madrid, SCOPE Art in New York and Askeaton Contemporary Arts Welcome To The Neighborhood.
In 2010 he was awarded the Arts Council of Northern Ireland Major artist award and in 2009 he was the recipient of a six-month Artist’s Residency Programme at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin. He has exhibited both nationally and internationally, with work shown in the Mediations Biennale in Poznan Poland, UNOACTU in Dresden, La Sala Naranja in Valencia, the Ormeau Baths Gallery Belfast, and the Beursschouwburg in Brussels, amongst others.

Allan Hughes is based in Belfast at Orchid Studios.
PhD, University of Ulster, Belfast (supervised by Profs. Willie Doherty & Kerstin Mey) 2006-2010
MA in Fine Art University of Ulster, Belfast 2003-05
BA Hons in Fine Art University of Ulster, Belfast 1996-99
http://www.allanhughes.com/

PART II
17 November - 1 December

The Oyster Effect
2010 12mins51sec
Valentina Ferrandes
This film is a collage of narrating voices over images of architectural spaces and landscapes. The voice-overs include a reading of a letter written by a young lady who was diagnosed with hysteria by Freud, which describes one of the symptoms of her illness, her temporary inability to speak her mother language. The letter is played firstly over images of an early 20th century modernist building, and then of the Church of San Pietro and Paolo, in Galatina, southern Italy, dedicated to the cult of Saint Paul and Tarantism. The journey continues with a long shot of a car traveling through a semi-deserted landscape, hit by heavy rain, and accompanied by the voice of the architect Le Corbusier lecturing on planning for the industrial city. Later, shots of mentally unstable women in altered states of consciousness, being treated through dance in San Paolo’s church in Galatina, are accompanied by fragments of a love story.
The film refers to the condition known as Tarantism which was common in southern Italy. It produced heightened excitability and restlessness in the victims, and it was believed that they needed to engage in frenzied dancing to prevent death.Their dancing and public meetings were held in the chapel of Saint Paul.

Valentina Ferrandes investigates the relationship between built environments and individual and collective identity. Using video, photography, and narration, she explores architecture as a performative and contextual space where the shaping of individuality stems from conflicts related to economic power, social roles, cultural specificity, and linguistic identity.

Italian, based in London, working with video and photography.
Studied Art, Music and Drama at Bologna University, and graduated in Fine Art at Chelsea College of Art and Design, 2009.
In 2008 she took part in a residency at China Academy of Art, Shanghai
Her work has been exhibited widely in Europe and UK.
In 2009 and 2010 she was a finalist for Matt Roberts Salon Video Prize, Salon Photo Prize, Celeste Prize, and Renaissance Arts Prize.
In 2011 "The Oyster Effect" has been included in the Biennial of Young Mediterranean Artists, and will be exhibited in the Museum of Contemporary Art Rome in December.
http://www.valentinaferrandes.com/
http://www.valentinaferrandes.com/theoystereffect.html

Taxi III - Stand up and Cry Like a Man
2010 3mins34sec
Lisa Byrne
Taxi III compiles interviews with taxi drivers who reveal, through their direct accounts of violence, the historical scars of the Northern Irish experience. Seen in tight shots, mostly sitting in cars, the men speak cryptically yet frankly of their near-death experiences and the aftereffects. It was one of 25 videos selected by YouTube Play from over 23,000 entries for the first Biennial of Creative Video at the Guggenheim Museum.

Lisa Byrne works mainly in photography and video. Her work centres on human experience, taking an intimate path into the lives of those with whom she has a personal relationship.

Exhibiting internationally since 1995, Byrne’s solo shows include: Mars Gallery, Moscow (2004), Four Corners Gallery, London (2008), and Krakow Photo Month’s Great Expectations: Photography from Great Britain (2010).
Major group exhibitions include: A Biennial of Creative Video at the Guggenheim Museums world wide in association with You Tube Play (2010); Elective Perspective, Galeria Arsenal, Bialystok, Poland (2010); Salon Video Art Prize, London (2010); A View from Napoleon’s Nose, KYU Arts Center, Taiwan (2010); On Time, Courtauld Institute of Art, London (2009); Isolated, Golden Thread Gallery, Belfast (2008); and Body City - Video Apartment 20, Docklands, Dublin (2007).

Born 1973 in Northern Ireland, currently based in London.
MA in Photography Royal College of Art, London 2007.
BA Middlesex University, London 1996
www.lisa-byrne.co.uk/

Reconsidering The New Industrial Parks Near Irvine, California by Lewis Baltz, 1974
2009 13mins
Mario Pfeifer
Reconsidering revisits one of the industrial structures which the artist and photographer Lewis Baltz documented from the outside. This film depicts the interior of one of metal workshops with an eleven minute tracking shot. At the same time, the 1974 book by Baltz, The New Industrial Parks Near Irvine, California, is reconsidered from back to front, each turning page presented beside the continuous 16 mm black and white footage.

The voice-over is an interview with J.R. Billington, a company owner in this building for nineteen years, in which he discusses the socio-economic situation in military manufacturing in Orange County in the 1980‘s and today.
http://www.ahornmagazine.com/issue_7/werecommend_baltz_pfeifer/werecommend_baltz_pfeifer.html

Mario Pfeifer - selected exhibitions and screenings
Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles; KOW Berlin; KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin; Frankfurter Kunstverein; Zollamt/ MMK, Frankfurt am Main; Anthology Film Archives, New York; MoCA, Detroit; Museum of Art and Design, New York; Waseda University, Tokyo; Landesgalerie, Linz; Les Rencontres Internationales, Centre George Pompidou, Paris; Temporäre Kunsthalle, Berlin; Salon Video Art Prize 2010, London; Museum Folkwang, Essen; European Media Arts Festival; KunstFilmBiennale, Cologne; World Film Festival, Bangkok; and many others.

Born in 1981 in Dresden, Germany. Lives and works in Berlin and New York
Studied at Academy of Visual Arts, Leipzig (HGB); University of the Arts, Berlin (UDK); and graduated in Visual Art and Film at Städelschule Frankfurt in 2008.
Fulbright scholarship at California Institute of the Arts, Los Angeles 2008/09.
Grants from Goethe Institut and DAAD led him to Bangkok, Mumbai, and New York.
http://www.mariopfeifer.com/

Movement in a Minor Familiar (Schubert Tape)
2010 5mins30sec
Holly Antrum
The structure of this film is set by limitations which the artist has imposed on her technique and material. The images were shot with a wind-up 16mm Bolex movie camera, which is unable to capture more than 10 seconds at a time, so the film is visually made up of many sections. The sound-track is from a tape she found, labelled ‘Schubert’, which is a recording of her long deceased grandfather rehearsing a speech alone in his native Czech, a language she did not understand. Rather than providing a sub-title translation, she allows this language barrier to impose a sense of separation, inviting our attention to move with the images. We are further separated in our own ‘watching’ in that we see and hear another audience within the film as they make focal adjustments to a projector and commence a slide show.

Holly Antrum works in film and printmaking. She uses darkroom experiments and her digitized archives of photographs and recordings, art history, and her own life.

Group exhibitions include:
2010-11 New Contemporaries 2010, A Foundation, Liverpool and ICA, London
2009 Summer Exhibition, Royal Academy, London
2007-08 Jerwood Drawing Prize 2007, Jerwood Space, London and tour to Cheltenham, Glasgow, Bristol, Cardiff and Newcastle
2006 New Contemporaries 2006, A Foundation, Liverpool & Rochelle School, London
2005-06 Jerwood Drawing Prize 2005, Jerwood Space, London and tour to Cheltenham, Glasgow, Cardiff and Bournemouth

Born London, 1983. Lives and works in London.
MA Printmaking at the Royal College of Art (2009-2011)
BA Hons Fine Art Painting at Wimbledon College of Art (2002-2005)
http://www.hollyantrum.com

Dates: 3rd November 2011 – 1st December 2011