This screening brings together works by UK-based artists who participated in the LUX Associate Artists Programme (2007-2013). Led by curator Ian White, who passed away in 2013, this short-lived initiative had a significant impact on artists’ moving image production in Britain, arguably redefining a new generation of practitioners. Alumni includes artists Corin Sworn, Anja Kirschner, Ed Atkins, Matthew Noel-Tod, Rachel Reupke, Patrick Staff, Grace Schwindt, Cara Tolmie as well as Turner prize winner and nominees Laure Prouvost, James Richards and Luke Fowler. Heavily oriented towards critical discourse, the AAP was a 12-month post-academic programme which aimed to provide a mutually supportive context in which to develop work. John Akomfrah, Robert Beavers, Stuart Comer, Chrissie Iles, Mark Leckey, Laura Mulvey and Lis Rhodes were amongst the many guest speakers and mentors.

LUX is celebrating this year the 50th anniversary of the London Film-Makers’ Co-operative, its predecessor organization.  A number of initiatives, including a screening series at Anthology Film Archives in October, have revisited and reflected on the legacy of that organization, looking back on 50 years of artists’ engagement with the moving image in the UK. In contrast, this program proposes to reconsider the significance of the AAP and White’s mentorship on British artists’ moving image practice today, drawing a comparison between the contexts of the Co-op and the AAP and their catalyst function.

The screening will be introduced by Maria Palacios Cruz, Deputy Director of LUX and followed by a discussion with Erika Balsom.

Monolog

Laure Prouvost

UK, 2009, 9 min, digital, color, sound

Prouvost parodies her own role as a director, and our role as an audience, as she draws attention to the screening space itself.

Laure Prouvost was a LUX associate artist in 2008/2009. She received the MaxMara Art Prize for Women in 2011 and the Turner Prize in 2013.

The Foxes

Corin Sworn

UK, 2013, 18 min, HD, colour, sound

The Foxes arises from the reexamination of a collection of slides taken in 1973 by Gavin A. Smith, a social anthropologist and the artist&’s father. These images were taken during his fieldwork in Huasicancha, a highland village in Peru.

Corin Sworn was a LUX associate artist in 2010/2011. She received the Max Mara Art Prize for Women in 2014 and represented Scotland at the Venice Biennale in 2013.

Depositions

Luke Fowler

UK, 2014, 24 min, HD, colour, sound

Sounds and images from the television archive of BBC Scotland are the soil upon which Fowler scatters his fleeting thoughts on eccentricity, collectivity and lost potential. Clashes of thoughts on lifestyle choices and future uncertainties are played out in a quietly romantic montage.“Luke Fowler’s films dwell on potentiality: what might be, what might have been, what might still be if the world were to turn in a different direction? But film time runs in many directions, as do arguments. Film made only recently can be easily confused with the archival vintage of washed-out or saturated tones and blurred edges. Only the disjunction between sounds that live close within the ear and rich voices from a fading past distinguish archive from present. Gradually the pieces converge: our nostalgia for ancient folkways, traditional song and the romance of freedom, all undercut by scientific rationalism and the pressures of normativity bringing law to bear on lives resistant to conformity. What is an archive if not a collection of letters to ourselves?’” (David Toop)

Luke Fowler was a LUX Associate Artist in 2008/2009 and was shortlisted for the Turner Prize in 2012.

Why La Bamba?

Kathryn Elkin

2015, UK, 17 min, HD, colour sound

A meditation on roleplaying, performance, cinema and the talk show featuring musician John McKeown, cast as a young, nervous Dustin Hoffman.

Kathryn Elkin was a LUX associate artist in 2012-2013.

Rolls and Shutters

Stina Wirfelt

2016, UK, 17 min, HD, colour, sound

Taking as its starting point the photographic archives of the Thistle Foundation and Craigmillar Festival Society in Edinburgh, rather than examining the known facts and details of the photographs held in the archives, the narrator uses them to recall her own memories of making photographs as a teenager.

Stina Wirfelt was a LUX associate artist in 2008-2009.

Maria Palacios Cruz is deputy director at LUX, the UK agency for the support and promotion of artists’ moving image practice. From 2010 to 2012, she was the director of Courtisane, an annual festival in Ghent, Belgium, where she continues to be involved as an associate programmer. She has curated screenings, events and exhibitions for festivals and institutions including Cinematek, Brussels; Impakt Utrecht; WIELS, Brussels; M HKA, Antwerp; ARGOS Centre for Art and Media, Brussels; Tate Britain, London and Centre Pompidou, Paris. Together with Mark Webber, she is the co-founder and manager of The Visible Press, a London-based imprint for books on cinema and writings by filmmakers.

Erika Balsom is Senior Lecturer in Film Studies and Liberal Arts at King’s College London, specializing in the study of the moving image in art. She is the author of Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary art (2013) and the co-editor of Documentary Across Disciplines (2016). Her next book, After Uniqueness: A History of Film and Video Art in Circulation, is forthcoming from Columbia University Press in 2017. She is a frequent contributor to Artforum and Sight and Sound, and has published widely in academic journals and exhibition catalogues, with recent texts on Pere Portabella, Candice Breitz, and the figure of the grid in digital art.

LUX is an international arts agency agency for the support and promotion of artists’ moving image practice and the ideas that surround it. Founded in 2002, it builds on a lineage of predecessor organisations (The London Filmmakers Co-operative, London Video Arts and The Lux Centre) which stretches back to the 1960s. LUX is the only organisation of its kind in the UK, it represents the country’s only significant collection of artists’ film and video and is the largest distributor of such work in Europe.