John Woodman works with landscape as an experimental film/video maker and photographer and has exhibited work internationally over a period of 38 years. The collection of films selected for this DVD focus on his early landscape work in 16mm and Super 8 film made between 1977 to 1982. Exploring time-space and light his work concerns ways in which, through landscape, visual transformation, change and transience are represented and perceived in film. Particular emphasis is given to the way in which through time, changes in light, weather and season affect our perception of space and place.

Using 16mm cameras, artist Ben Rivers documents the solitary existence of Jake, a man who lives in isolation in the middle of the forest in a remote part of Scotland. The film follows his unconventional life, capturing moments of profound beauty. Jake is seen in all seasons, surviving frugally, passing the time with strange projects, living the radical dream he had as a younger man, a dream he spent two years working at sea to realise.

Gracefully constructed, Two Years at Sea creates an intimate connection with an individual who would otherwise be a complete outsider to us.

Ben Rivers: Shorts
Saturday August 4th, 16:10h
Sunday August 5th, 2012 18:40h
Thursday August 9th, 2012 18:40h
BFI Southbank
Belvedere Road, South Bank, London SE1 8XT

This new LUX touring programme brings together five early shorts by Ben Rivers - The Coming Race; This Is My Land; A World Rattled of Habit; Origin of the Species, Ah, Liberty - which together present a series of portraits of unconventional lives - of people existing, to varying degrees, in wilderness or isolation. River's films are compassionate and elliptical, ambigious documents of both the reality of life outside urban norms and our own Romantic preconceptions of a life beyond bounds. The programme includes This Is My Land, Rivers' first portrait of Jake Williams, later the subject of Two Years at Sea.

LUX/ICA Biennial of Moving Images Symposium
May 26-27
ICA Theatre, The Mall, London SW1Y 5AH

In addition to the talks programme, the students of the LUX/Central Saint-Martins MRes Art: Moving Image course will co-produce a two-day student symposium for UK-based MA and PhD students to present their research into artists’ moving image. The two days will explore ideas around ‘failure’ and ‘contemporary currents’.

 

On Failure
Saturday 26 May, 10am – 1pm, ICA Theatre

Keynote address: Jan Verwoert, Why Rudie Can’t Fail
Jan Verwoert is a critic, writer, curator, art historian, and contributing editor to Frieze magazine.

Further papers by:

Anirban Gupta-Nigam, Failure as Possibility: Reading Two Fragments of Moving-Image Work
Jawaharlal Nehru University, School of Arts and Aesthetics, Delhi

Conventionally, in radical political and aesthetic practice, the body of the exhausted person is sought to be energised, radicalised and politicised. Failed, exhausted bodies must be re-energised so that they can engage in the project of (political) transformation. Following a different path, through a reading of two fragments of moving-image work, this paper argues for failure as possibility and attempts to locate exhaustion and failure as potentiality, as moments when, freed from the teleology of the search for a ‘better future’, we see every moment in the now as being open to various possible futures.

Inger Lise Hansen is a visual artist with background in experimental film and animation who for the last two decades has produced a distinctive and acclaimed body of moving image work. This publication presents her recent film trilogy, Proximity (2006), P

Peter Gidal is a renowned filmmaker, writer and theorist who has exhibited films internationally for the past 40 years. This limited edition DVD presents a rare performance by Gidal in which he interrogates his own practice as an experimental filmmaker an

John Smith’s influential films have been shown in cinemas and galleries around the world for more than three decades. Inspired by the Structural Materialist ideas that dominated British artists’ filmmaking during his formative years, but also fascinated b

Jo Ann Kaplan is an acclaimed prize-winning filmmaker whose work has been exhibited in galleries, cinemas, festivals and on television worldwide for the past 40 years. Her work is marked by an extraordinary diversity of forms which includes animation, dan

The films of award-winning British artist Sarah Pucill have been celebrated at film festivals world-wide and shown in cinemas and galleries internationally. At the core of her practice is a concern with mortality and the materiality of the filmmaking proc

John Latham (1921 - 2006) was one of the most important British artists of the post-war period, best remembered for his painting and sculptural works which incorporated materials such as glass, canvas and books. Less well-known, but now restored after sev