LUX28

2008/09
28th May 2008

LUX announced the opening of LUX28 ,

a new temporary exhibition space which
presents a year-long investigation into how
artists’ films and videos are made, discussed
and collected.
Gregg Bordowitz
Conflicting Tendencies
Exhibition: from the 28th to 31rst May
2008
Talk: ‘Gregg Bordowitz in person’
Tuesday the 29th May 2008 at 7pm.
Gregg Bordowitz talked about the
conflicting impulses and philosophical
contradictions that inform his work,
drawing from literature and theory to
examine structures of belief. Followed
by a conversationwith LUX assistant
director Mike Sperlinger.
A week-long presentation of the work of artist and
activist Gregg Bordowitz. Several of Bordowitz’s videos,
alongside a range of other texts and related materials he
selected, were on display in the space during the day.
A US-based writer and video maker who has been living
with AIDS for two decades, Bordowitz is almost impossible
to classify – his practice has consistently eroded the
conceptual boundaries between art, activism, teaching,
writing and performance. A contemporary of Andrea Fraser
and Mark Dion at the Whitney Independent Study Program
in New York in the 1990s, he was at the same time a key
member of ACT UP, a ground-breaking AIDS activism
group. Bordowitz’s videos, including Fast Trip Long Drop
(1993), A Cloud In Trousers (1995) and Habit (2001), have
been widely shown in festivals, museums, cinemas and
broadcast internationally. His writings have been published
in anthologies such as AIDS: Cultural Analysis, Cultural
Activism, and Queer Looks, and numerous publications and
journals including Village Voice, Frieze, Artforum, October,
Documents and Art Journal. In addition to being a memberof
the faculty of the film department at the School of the Art
Institute of Chicago, he is on the faculty of the Whitney
Museum Independent Study Program. In 2007/8, he has
been a visiting professor at the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna
Sharon Hayes
In the near future
Exhibition: from the 17th to the 21th
June 2008
Preview: 15th June 2008
New York-based artist Sharon Hayes (b. 1970, USA) creates
and documents situations that investigate the history and
construction of public opinion, speech and gesture in relation
to processes of individual and collective subject formation.
Her performances and installations engage with the critical
potential of art to question the way in which we take part,
both as speakers and listeners, in current political discourse.
For In the Near Future, Hayes staged anachronistic and
speculative solo protests that investigated the figure of the
protester and the act of speech of the protest slogan. In
this series of performative actions, Hayes stands on the
street holding signs, some of which are culled from past
protests while others hold more elusive and speculative
messages. The work questioned how our knowledge of
the past is mediated by images and in turn these produce
meaning in excess of the original events and represent a
future possibility for action. In London, Hayes developed
three new actions based on the city’s specific history of
dissent. As part of the work, Hayes invited the audience
to both watch and participate through documenting the
actions. These photographic documentations, which
were presented as a multiple slide installation at LUX 28,
raised issues of circulation and production of meaning.
In the Near Future was part of Perplexed in Public, a
series of off-site works and performances organized
by Lisson Gallery and taking place across central
London during the months of June and July 2008.
Archivos OVNI
Exhibition: from the 26th June to 26th
July 2008
Opening event: Thursday 26 June
2008 7.30pm. Toni Serra/Abu Ali and
Xavi Hurtado, founders of Archivos
OVNI introduced the ideas behind the
project and presented selected works
from the collection.
 Founded in 1993 Archivos OVNI (Observatorio de
Video No Identificado) is an independent artists’ video
archive project based at the Centre for Contemporary
Art in Barcelona. The aim of the archive is to collect and
disseminate works that challenge prevailing western mass
media representations of the world and give a voice to
unrepresented people and cultures. The archives are unique
in that they cut across moving image disciplines: from
video art to independent documentary and mass media
archaeology, they draw together extraordinarily diverse
works which share a commitment to personal expression.
The Archives are the core of the OVNI project, but rather
than being a static resource they are conceived of as part of
a dialogue which aims to encourage an ongoing critique of
contemporary culture and society. This dialogue is realised
through the collection and dissemination of works; through
the screenings and debates which OVNI hosts; through the
collaboration with other agencies and the staging of aspects
of the project across the world in places as disparate as New
York, Amman, Casablanca, Istanbul, Amsterdam, Bogotá,
Buenos Aires, Mexico, Tijuana, Marse-ille, Paris, Stuttgart,
Graz, Brescia, Lecce, Madrid, Lugano, Valencia and Seoul.
Archivos OVNI presented the project for the first time
in London with a specially curated selection of works
presented at LUX 28 in the form of a video library and weekly
screening programme. The selection particularly focused on
questions of exodus and resistance, two principal themes
within the archive, and the tensions that draw a line from
subjective experience to specific social and political realities.
Over 100 works will be presented, including Xavi Hurtado’s
Nawpa [0.1] which explores indigenous resistance to
western interests in Ecuador, Calle y Media Cooperativa’s
Abajo el COLONialismo, a documentary about anti-
colonialism in Venezuela, Nahed Awwad’s Lions, an eye
witness testimony of the invasion of Ramallah, Dallia
Ennadre’s El Batalett which follows a group of Moroccan
women in Casablanca’s old Medina and Electronic
Lebanon’s From Beirut to... those who love us, a series
of broadcasts from Beirut during the 2006 bombings.

En Décimas las Propie- Programa 2. 60’ Lions Palestine, 2002, 10 El Batalett – Femmes de Texas Sunrise. USA / Spain,

Programa 3. 60’

Programa 4. 70’
Programa 1. 80’

dades del Limón. USA / Nahed Awwad la Medina. Morocco / 1991, 20’. Lluís Escartin
Colombia / Spain, 2000, France, 2002, 60’ Dalila
8.Xavier Hurtado. Meen Erhabe (Who is the Ennadre. City of Saba. USA, 2007,9’
Terrorist?). Palestine / USA, DJ Kadagian – Four Sea-
El Río de las Estrellas.Co- 2003. sons Productions.
lombia / Spain, 2002, 25.
Xavier Hurtado From Beirut to... those who Last Night Dikr. Morocco,
love us. Lebanon, 2006, 2005, 7’Abu Ali.
Nawpa [0.1]. Ecuador / 5’Electronic
Spain 2004-2007, 13’14”. Mast Qalandar. Pakistan/
Xavier Hurtado July Trip. Lebanon / France, Germany, 2005, 30’ Till Pas-
2006, 35’Wael Noureddine. sow.
Abajo el COLONialismo.
Venezuela, 2005, 30 Calle y
Media Cooperativa.
Stephan Dillemuth
Selected Films
Exhibition: from the 18th to 28th
September 2008
Opening event: Thursday 18
September 2008 7pm. Screening
of Lichtmenschen im Sumpf der Sonne
– Studien zur Lebensreform
(Sunpeople in the Slush of the Light
- Studies on the Reform of Life), 2002.
Followed by Q&A with Stephan
Dillemuth.
Double bill screening: Saturday
20th September 2008 4pm. Screening
of Elbsandsteingebirge
1789-1848 (DE, 1994, 54mins) and
Gesetzt nämlich, dies wäre wahr, wäre
es damit auch schon wünschenswert?
(DE, 1998, 62mins) and Assuming
then, this would be true, would that
make it desirable also?, a video about
Richard Wagner and his Circle, fol-
lowed by Q&A with Stephan Dillemuth.
A rare opportunity to see the recent films of Munich-based
artist Stephan Dillemuth was presented for the first time
with English subtitles. Anja Kirschner curated the exhibition.
Stephan Dillemuth is an artist who sees art as a tool for
artistic research and critical reflection on the circumstances
of contemporary life. His inquiry into recent changes in
the idea of the public sphere takes place against the
backdrop of our globalised, localised and fragmented
publics. Considering the impact of ‘lifestyle’ as a new
ideology of self-fulfilment and liberation, Stephan
Dillemuth has investigated the German Lebensreform
movements at the turn of the 19th to the 20th century.
Avoiding didactic explanations or direct comparisons
with the present, Stephan Dillemuth’s work settles in the
gap between a contemporary and a historical reading.
Work shown:
Lichtmenschen im Sumpf der Sonne – Studien zur
Lebensreform (People of Light in the Slush of the Sun
Studies in the Reform of Life). mountains themselves we see ourselves confronted with our own
In Germany, around the turn of the century, a number of groups were projections: Was the Romantic political? Or were the politics romantic?
formed that can be subsumed under the term ‘Lebensreform’ (Life
Reform). These part utopian, revolutionary, reactionary and reformist
approaches characterised the most varied attempts to break free from
the Empire of the day: the nationalistic, capitalistic and monolithic Gesetzt nämlich, dies wäre wahr, wäre es damit auch
Wilhelminian Reich. Other groups were, on the contrary, persecuted schon wünschenswert? (Assuming then, this would
by the society of the Third Reich, and incorporated or forced into be true, would that make it desirable also?)
line, which again produced another monolithic homogeneity. ‘The A Video about Richard Wagner and his Circle. Richard Wagner was
video that Stephan Dillemuth attempted to make about these a despot, anti-Semite and racist. Despite these warnings Stephan
matters was bound to fail in the face of their very complexity. Dillemuth undertakes a diving attempt to seek the Rheingold in the
Instead of presenting a refined and finished product, he confronts sediment of a bygone century. But instead the failed revolutionary
us with the assembled rubble of his investigation... a performance?’ Wagner introduces him to a nationalistic culture and the the musty
restauration climate of the Wilhelminian era. A familiar scene.. But
Elbsandsteingebirge. 1789-1840. how can one dare to make an escape in the different costumes
The bizarre landscape of the Elbsandstein mountains south of Dresden, of this epoch? Siegfried, Marx, Nietzsche and King Ludwig, on
served as the repository for the motives of nearly all German Romantics. the whole pleasant people...When he surfaces from a parallel
Their paintings have shaped our romantic view of the time between the period Delmont finds himself in the bourgeois prison of the multi-
French Revolution and the March Revolution in Germany. In a journey nationals. Can we dance on this stage? Discover it for yourself!’
through images, movies and texts, and a trip in the Elbsandstein
Auguste Orts
Correspondence
Exhibition: from the 2nd October
to the 1rst of November 2008
Preview: Thurs 2 October 2008.
6-8pm
Screening: 1 October 2008 6.30pm.
Screening of selected Auguste Orts
films followed by artists in discussion.
Tate Modern, London.
Auguste Orts/Scanner broadcast
on Resonance FM: 20 October 2008
8pm.
Auguste Orts is a Brussels-based collective of four artists – Alongside the video library and reading room, the
Herman Asselberghs, Sven Augustijnen, Manon de Boer and artists asked Scanner to re-mix the soundtracks of
Anouk De Clercq – who all work predominately with the moving their video work into a new composition. The resulting
image. They describe their practice as ‘...at the crossroads was presented as a sound work in the exhibition
of cinema, video, visual arts, documentaries, experimental space at LUX 28 and broadcast on Resonance FM
films... where media and disciplines cross-fertilize each other.’ The exhibition was supported by The Elephant Trust and
Auguste Orts is interesting as a working model for addressing Vlaams Ministerie van Cultuur, Jeugd, Sport en Media.
the particular issues associated with artists’ working with the
moving image. As well as facilitating their own projects the
organisation attempts to address a wider discourse through
supporting other artists by organising an inclusive talks and
screening programme. This desire to generate a critical
discourse around their own work, and in doing so embrace
the work of others, relates very closely to LUX’s origins in the
London Filmmakers’ Coop, which was an inclusive forum
for dialogue and exhibition as much as hub for production.
At LUX 28 August Orts installed a video library and
reading area for the public to explore the group’s work,
influences and interests. To further elucidate their
ideas the group entered a correspondance during the
summer and these letters were available in the reading
area.Films, books and other sources mentioned in the
letters, were on display and completed the dialogue.
Free at the Point of Interest
Screening and discussion: 2nd
November 2008 12 to 5pm
An afternoon’s screening and discussion looking at class
and culture.
Taking the work of sociologist Pierre Bourdieu as our
starting point we looked at the discreet social rules
that govern the cultural arena, what purpose they
serve and the possibilities and implications of change.
Pierre Bourdieu (1930-2002) was a sociologist whose
research included studies of the art world, the literary
sphere and academia in France. Sociology is a Martial Art
(Pierre Carles, France 2002 146 mins) follows Bourdieu
over a period of 3 years as he lectures, attends political
rallies, travels, meets with his students, staff, and his
research team. During the course of the film some of his
difficult ideas and concepts are revealed clearly through
the discussions and interactions he has with other people.
His work has been influential on current critical
contemporary art, partly because it looks at the
relationship between art and market forces, but it also
contains a far more uncomfortable class critique of art
and intellectual activity, that has largely been ignored:
“Art and cultural consumption are predisposed,
consciously and deliberately or not, to fulfill a social
function of legitimating social differences.”, Pierre Bourdieu,
Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (1979).
When asked for a practical suggestion for how to make up
for inequalities in what he called cultural capital, Bourdieu
suggested that schools should incorporate teaching on the
often hidden social rules and niceties of art and culture -
things that are normally passed down to better-off children
at home - to help disadvantaged kids get the measure of
their peers, and feel more confident in getting involved
in cultural activity. More recently, the UK government
suggested all schools provide 5 hours of culture per
week to make up for a lack of arts education in schools.
There will be a screening of Sociology is a Martial Art
(Pierre Carles, France 2002 146 mins) followed by a
group seminar with special guests Sonya Dyer - artist
and author of the ‘Boxed In’ report and Nirmal Puwar
- senior lecturer in sociology at Goldsmiths College.
‘Free at the point of interest’ is organised by Tom Roberts
and Jackie Holt.
Steve Reinke
Hobbit Love is the Greatest Love
Exhibition: from the 14th of
November to the 19th of December
2008
Preview: Thurs 13th November
7 -9pm
Artist Talk: ‘Steve Reinke in
conversation with Adrian Rifkin’.
Saturday 15th November 2008 at
3pm.
Steve Reinke is best known for his video work. Often
outrageous, yet nonetheless engaging and even titillating,
his themes range from introspective anxiety to bemused
and appreciative voyeurism. Reinke’s voice is articulate and
literate and often speaks in the voice of academic or cultural
authority. His work diverges into absurd, unexpected
directions — paradoxes, non-sequiturs, inadequate
hypotheses, cruel jokes, and contorted metaphors – delivered
in Reinke’ inimitably laconic and dispassionate tones.
Reinke’s work also often invokes the idea of the anthology,
along with the taxonomical urge to exhaustively catalogue
existence. The exhibition at LUX 28 presented a kind of
anthology of Reinke’s video work to date. This included the
ambitious project, The Hundred Videos (1989-1996), a six-
year project Reinke stated would constitute his work as a
young artist, and recent works such as My Rectum is Not
a Grave (To a Film Industry in Crisis) (2007), Boy/Analysis:
An Abridgement of Melanie Klein’s ‘Narrative of a Child
Analysis (2008) and Final Thoughts, an ongoing series that
will only be completed at the moment of Reinke’s death.
Alongside projected works and an extensive video library
the exhibition will also present a number of his wall
pieces including The American Military Casualties of the
Second Gulf War for Whom Photographs Were Available ‘There is no such thing as self-esteem.
as of November 6, 2006 Arranged by Attractiveness and I don’t trust anyone who doesn’t
Guernica (2005). Reinke’s disquieting combination of light have frequent bouts of self-loathing...
and playful monologues, laced with an acid humour, prods Whenever I hear the word ‘culture’ I think of bacteria
and pokes at the sub-conscious underbelly of everyday life. mutating under an ultraviolet light and I’m happy again
for a while. Within the Petri dish: unfettered, egoless
desire, the proliferation of new possibilities, ideas
made flesh, uncaring and finally airborne. Empathy
is a tool for making the cruelty more precise. Beauty
is independent of taste; the sublime only works for
suckers.hh Whenever I laugh I feel guilty.’ Reinke
LUX28
2009

Six Tuesdays After Film as a Critical Practice

3rd February 2009 3th March 2009
Tom Holert: Critical Practice Emily Roysdon
Video screening of Ricostruzione
followed by a talk on the line between 10th March 2009
and the issues around working both as Reformzirkus: Kluge’s television pro-
a critic, a critical writer and as an artist gramme intervention from 1970.
making critical, essay-structured video.
17th March 2009
10th February 2009 (to be cofirmed) Emily Wardill interviews Peter Gidal
Cerith Wyn Evans

24th February 2009 (to be confirmed)

Western Round Table, to show Rosa
Barba’s work.
Tom Holert
Ricostruzioine
Art historian and critic Tom Holert presented and discussed his
recent collaboration with Claudia Honecker: the video essay
Ricsostruzione (2008, 20mins). Commissioned for Manifesta
7, Ricostruzione is a multilevel inquiry into architecture, politics,
psychology, and philosophy loosely based on the lives and works of
Beppino Disertori (1907–1992) and Adalberto Libera (1903–1963).

Disertori was a neuropsychiatrist with neovitalist leanings, a humanist

philosopher and antifascist active in the resistance during the German
occupation of Italy. His prolific writings span clinical studies, psychology,
philosophy, and travel. In the 1960s he lectured sociopsychiatry at the
first sociological department at a Italian university. Among his students
was Renato Curzio, later founder of the Red Brigades. Libera was one
of the most visible young “rationalist” architects during Italy’s Fascist
regime; he continued to work in postwar Italy as a project manager
with INA-Casa, the vast state reconstruction program—posited as a
laboratory for new articulations of dwelling—that generated hundreds of
building projects between 1949 and 1963. The juxtaposition of Disertori
and Libera may (and should) appear incommensurate and forced.
Ricostruzione neither initiates a posthumous dialogue between the
two nor suggests a reconciliation. Instead, it reads their historically and
intellectually specific projects by reconfiguring and fictionalizing them.
At the same time, it raises questions about the potential for research
within the institutional and theoretical realm of contemporary visual arts.

Before an open discussion with the audience Holert talked about the
circumstantial whereabouts of the video, his ideas and experiences (as
a critical writer) regarding his sudden injection into the Biennial circuit (in
the unfamiliar role of an art practitioner), the tacit curatorial interpellations
of criticality and site specificity and, in an extended reflection,
about the peculiar force of “interest” in art and research projects.
Cerith Wyn Evans
British artist Cerith Wyn Evans joins Ian White in a sweeping conversation
about film and performance, the auditorium, fact, fiction, fantasy,
simultaneity, criticality and romance. In July 2008 Ian White presented a
solo performance during which Tony Conrad’s Flicker (1966) was played
simultaneously with a live reading of various personal and found texts. In
June 2009 Cerith Wyn Evans presents his first film work for thirty years
at the 53rd Venice Biennale. This conversation occurs at the intersection
of the two projects, exploring a common interest in Tony Conrad’s
film and its effects to not so much describe positions as enact them.
Tony Conrad’s Flicker and other films were screened
throughout the conversation and simultaneously with it.

Cerith Wyn Evans was born in 1958 in Wales. Cerith Wyn Evan’s
conceptual practice incorporates a wide range of media, including
installation works, sculptures, photography, film and text. He has
participated in numerous group exhibitions internationally, including the
Venice Biennale (1995 and 2003), 9th International Istanbul Biennial
(2005) and Documenta 11 (2002). Recent solo exhibitions include
MIT List Visual Arts Centre, and Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (2004),
Frankfurter Kunstverein (2004), Kunsthaus Graz (2005), BAWAG
Foundation, Vienna (2005), Musée d’art moderne de la ville de Paris,
Paris (2006) and ICA, London (2006). He lives and works in London.
Rosa Barba
Western Round Table 2027
This week’s talk in was the form of a one-night exhibition. Rosa Barba’s
two-projector scultpure/sound work Western Round Table 2027
(2007) was shown alongside a selection of original recordings from
the 1949 Western Round Table on Modern Art featuring contributions
from Marcel Duchamp, Frank Lloyd Wright and Arnold Schoenburg.
“Two projectors, close together, face each other on a small plinth
that raises them slightly from the ground. Their lenses poke into the
air with modest defiance, as if to accuse each other. They speak at
the same time, projecting loops of clear 16mm film that sit on top
of them like hats and carry optical soundtracks of feint chimes (one
base, one melody) that sound like the clanking of old machinery,
the industrial past or modernism’s back catalogue, emblematic
of the machines producing them. The light of each projector’s bulb
throws the silhouette of its opposite large onto the gallery walls, their
shadows looming like characters in the alleyways of film noir, the
immaterial motif of a depleted genre made sculptural. But the title
of this work [...] points to the future – a future: Western Round Table
2027. As such this work becomes an already-antiquated memorial
sent back from a future without words, figured by the epochal
past of the early twentieth century, of derelict (modernist) form.
In 1949 the California School of Fine Arts organised The Western
Round Table on Modern Art in San Francisco. A group of men – from
art, literature, criticism, music, science, philosophy, architecture,
including Marcel Duchamp, Frank Lloyd Wright and Gregory Bateson
– publicly and privately discussed contemporary artistic practice,
its modernist legacy and a modernist future. Is the implication of
Rosa Barba’s 2007 ‘round table’ that this conversation was at once
already archaeological, cultural dereliction its subject, modernism
itself defined as a kind of predictive memorialisation? Certainly
the symposium might be read into Barba’s work even if it remains
exterior to it, in the field of the viewer’s independent research. But
Western Round Table 2027 is not necessarily about (or enacting)
a bankrupt aesthetic discourse. Instead it distils what might be its
source material into an abstract outside of space and time that
defines its terms as a monument and an enigma. If it stands for 1949
it might also stand for a generalised situation of seemingly impotent
negotiation (of politics or contemporary culture) – a debate trapped
in an endless loop, the echo chamber that defines its (our) condition
as ridiculous and unresolvable. Self-contained and timeless it is a
simultaneously open and closed object, a key to Barba’s practice.”
Emily Roysdon
In 2008 Emily Roysdon made the performance Work, Why, Why
not at the experimental dance venue Weld in Stockholm. The
performance was documented on video and in a series of still images.
Emily Roysdon’s presentation for Six Tuesdays... was an open
reorganisation and continuous discussion of this material. Six edited
videos, two audio recordings and a selection of photographs testify
to an inability to entirely document the live event and turn this inability
into a new kind of content. If the live performance was exploring the
relationship between the still image and movement, its recording
becomes about the relationship between document and experience.
Emily Roysdon conversed throughout and after the event’s
various attempts at displaying the different recordings.
In Work, Why, Why not, the action happens inside of four life-size
photographs on wheels. The choreography is invested in ideas
of risk and relations, renascence and impossibility. In this case, the
conventions of the theatre are compromised as the mobile images
take the place of language alongside the bodies onstage. There
are two microphones directed at the audience and volunteers are
asked to respond to a series of prompts via notecards, including
phrases such as “when an image looks familiar say ‘again’,” “when
you sense someone is taking a risk say ‘I have been her’,” “when
you expected something different to happen say ‘why’,” “when a
group is formed say ‘work’.” The result is a chorus of spontaneous
engagement with the action that materialize a record of the
experience that is distinct from visual veracity. [...] The accumulated
film project addresses the relation of the document to experience,
an extension of the image/ movement dyad of the performance. The
project produces an audio piece, a narrative film, a performance
video looped for installation, and the sculptural work “Four
Screens as Dialogue (pioneering, devotional, familiar, invasive)”.
Reformzirkus

First broadcast on the West German station WDRIII on April 3 The programme was presented here in full as an
1970, Reformzirkus is a television round-table discussion on interactive screening, during which the audience was
society and film featuring the director Alexander Kluge. It follows invited to write directly onto the projected image and
a season of Kluge’s work that was also broadcast on WDRIII and the surrounding walls in a collective attempt to map and
begins with a moderated conversation between him, the Munich- record the arguments being constructed on screen.
based film critic Siegfried Schober and the journalist and trade
union consultant Dieter Schmidt. In particular Kluge articulates
his position as a filmmaker in response to the challenges posed
to the practice by the protest movement of the early 1960s.

Some time into the discussion the programme’s editor passes a

note to the presenter, an action that enrages Kluge for what seems
to be its attempt at manipulating the conversation. Instigating the
immediate collapse of the formal situation, the ensuing argument
and its aftermath incorporates and includes the editor himself, the
camera and lighting crew in the television studio. Their unedited
exchanges with Kluge were broadcast in full and expose relationships
not only between society and ‘film’, but the politics and practicalities
of television and cultural activism at a particular point in time.
Emily Wardill interviews Peter Gidal
The final event in the Six Tuesdays... series saw Emily
Wardill interview Peter Gidal. This conversation was
the suggestion of Emily Wardill and was preceded by a
screening of two films selected by the the filmmakers:
No Night No Day, Peter Gidal. UK 1997, silent, 16mm, 15’
The Diamond (Descartes’ Daughter), Emily Wardill, UK 2008, 15’
Born in 1946, Peter Gidal studied theatre, psychology and
literature at Brandeis University, Massachussets, 1964-68,
and the University of Munich from 1966-7. He studied at the
Royal College of Art from 1968-71 where he went on to teach
Advanced Film Studies until 1984. He was an active member
of the London Film-makers’ Co-operative since 1969, and
Cinema Programmer there from 1971-4. Co-founder of the
Independent Film-makers’ Association, 1975, he served as a
member of the British Film Institute Production Board, 1978-81.
His films have been screened nationally and internationally,
including the Tate Gallery, the Hayward Gallery, and yearly from
1969 till 1979 at the Edinburgh Film Festival and the National
Film Theatre. Gidal has had retrospectives of his films at the
Institute of Contemporary Arts in 1983 and 1998, Centre George
Pompidou, Beaubourg, Paris, in 1996, and forthcoming in
2009, amongst others. International screenings include several
each at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Anthology Film
Archives, The Whitney Museum, the Royal Belgium Film Archive
and Cinematheque, Documenta 6, Arte Inglesi Oggi, X-Screen,
etc. He is the recipient of the Prix de la Recherche, Toulon 1974.
In 2008 he wrote Andy Warhol: Blow Job, published by
Afterall/ M.I.T Press. His previously published works include
Materialist Film (Routledge, 1989), Understanding Beckett:
Monologue and Gesture (Palgrave/Macmillan 1986), Warhol:
Films and Paintings (Studio Vista/Dutton 1971 and Da Capo
Press, NY 1991), and Gerhard Richter: The Polemics of
Paint (d’Offay Publ. 1995). His theoretical writings have been
published extensively in journals including Studio International,
Screen, Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui, and Undercut.
Emily Wardill born 1977, lives and works in London.
Recent solo exhibitions include the Institute of Contemporary Art
(ICA), London and Jonathan Viner / Fortescue Avenue, London.
Her works have also been included in group exhibitions such
as “Lightbox” at Tate Britain and “Ballet Mecanique” at Timothy
Taylor Gallery, “Reykjavik Experiment Marathon” curated by
Hans Ulrich Obrist and “An Ambiguous Case”, curated by Emily
Pethick at MUMOK, Vienna. Wardill is the first laureate of the
Follow Fluxus–After Fluxus grant, which will conclude with an
exhibition at the NKV Nassauischer Kunstverein Wiesbaden.