11 May 2018
This is a deep dive into a selection of the artists from our Video Days Exhibition, exploring their work alongside showing their films in the gallery.
Forensic Architecture (FA) is a research agency, based at Goldsmiths, University of London, who undertake advanced architectural and media research on behalf of international prosecutors, human rights organisations and political and environmental justice groups. Forensic architecture is also an emergent academic field developed at Goldsmiths, which refers to the production and presentation of architectural evidence – buildings and urban environments and their media representations.
In recent years FA has successfully tested its methodologies in a number of landmark legal and human rights cases undertaken together with and on behalf of threatened communities, Non-governmental organisations (NGOs), prosecutors and the United Nations (UN).
77sqm_9:26min, 2016, (27:23 mins)
Screening: Saturday 21 April, 11 am – 3 pm
Showing every 30 mins (free, no prior booking required).
Commissioned by the ‘Unraveling the NSU Complex’ people’s tribunal; Haus Der Kulturen Der Welt (HKW); Initiative 6 April; and documenta14.
Shortly after 17:00 on the 6 April 2006, Halit Yozgat, 21 years old, was murdered while attending the reception counter of his family run Internet café in Kassel, Germany. His was the ninth of ten racist murders committed by a neo-Nazi group known as the National Socialist Underground or NSU across Germany between 2000 and 2007.
At the time of the killing, an intelligence officer named Andreas Temme was present in the shop. Temme was at the time an employee of the State Office for Constitutional Protection (Landesamt für Verfassungsschutz), the domestic intelligence agency for the German state of Hessen. Temme did not disclose this fact to the police, but was later identified from his internet records.
In his interrogation by the police, and in the subsequent NSU trial in Munich, Temme denied being a witness to the incident, and claimed not to have noticed anything out of the ordinary. The court accepted his testimony. It determined that Temme was present at the back room of the internet café at the time of the murder. It also accepted that from his position in the shop it was possible not to have witnessed the killing.
Within the 77 square meters of the Internet café and the 9:26 minutes of the incident, different actors crossed paths — members of migrant communities, a state employee and the murderers — and were architecturally disposed in relation to each other. The shop was thus a microcosm of the entire social and political controversy that makes the ‘NSU Complex’.
In November 2016, eleven years after the murder, an alliance of civil society organisations known as ‘Unraveling the NSU Complex’ commissioned Forensic Architecture to investigate Temme’s testimony and determine whether it could be truthful.
Karen Cunningham is an artist based in Glasgow whose practice incorporates moving image, sculpture and photography. She studied photography at Edinburgh College of Art, including a study exchange to the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore USA, and completed her MFA at Glasgow School of Art. Her film and video works have been shown throughout the UK and Europe including Tramway, Glasgow; Collective Gallery, Edinburgh; Forum Stadtpark, Graz, Austria and the Malmö Konsthall, Sweden. Interested in the ideas progress and attribution Karen’s work explores the overlapping of emergent and residual aspects within culture and technology often drawing on disciplines such as Science-Fiction and Anthropology which utilise speculative approaches to knowledge and interpretation.
Karen also curates exhibitions, organises events and writes texts. These include the symposium ‘An Endless Theater: the convergence of contemporary art and anthropology in observational cinema’ featuring works by Karen Cunningham, Edward S. Curtis, Geoffrey Farmer, Rosalind Nashashibi, Jean Rouch, Sterling Ruby and John Smith at University of Edinburgh (2013) the online screening and essay series ‘The Anthropology Effect’ for MAP magazine (2013-14) and ‘Viewfinders’ a curated selection of artists film & videos as part of the artists moving image programme at Tramway, Glasgow for ‘Generation’ (2014).
Karen’s film Movable Type; Under Erasure, 2016 will be looped all day on Saturday 28 April.
Commissioned by Legion TV, it was first shown at The Showroom, London in 2016. Filmed largely on location at Writing-on-Stone, Canada the work features an original monologue written and read by the eminent theorist and cultural critic Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak.
Images: Courtesy of Karen Cunningham
Rollo Jackson is a London-based director whose work spans music videos, commercial work, and documentary filmmaking.
Jackson grew up immersed in the UK’s dance music culture. His music films for James Blake, Tate Britain and Warp Records all bear the subtle traces of mid-90s escapades spent clad in Versace prints and box-fresh Reeboks and soundtracked by crackling pirate radio or booming warehouse speakers.
His short film Gang Signs & Prayer will be looped in the Gallery on Wednesday 2 May.
A visual testament to Stormzy’s life and upbringing, the film chronicles Stormzy’s inner battles and temptations as he becomes master of his own destiny. Return of the Rucksack, Bad Boys and 100 Bags, taken from Stormzy’s award winning debut studio album Gang Signs & Prayer, serve as the soundtrack to the film of the same name.
The film has also recently been nominated for a Webby Award. You can vote for Gang Signs & Prayer here.
Slimzee’s Going On Terrible will be looped in sequence with Gang Signs & Prayer on Wednesday 2 May.
Slimzee (‘Godfather of Grime’) was the co-founder of Rinse FM and DJ in the UK Garage collective ‘Pay As You Go Cartel’. Slimzee’s Going On Terrible charts his life, following his early days in pirate radio to receiving a career-threatening Asbo. Features old & new footage and interviews from fellow DJ’s & MC’s and even his own mother.
Emily Richardson is a UK based filmmaker who creates film portraits of particular places. Her work focuses on sites in transition and covers an extraordinarily diverse range of landscapes including empty East London streets, forests, North Sea oil fields, post-war tower blocks, empty cinemas and Cold War military facilities. She is currently doing a practice-led PhD on modern architectural space in artists’ film and video at the Royal College of Art in London.
Richardson’s film Beach House, 2015 will be screened in the gallery on Tuesday 8 May (looped all day).
Beach House is a film about a unique example of rural modernism, built on the UK coast of Suffolk by architect John Penn. Penn was an architect, painter, musician and poet whose nine houses in East Suffolk are all built with uncompromising symmetry adhering to the points of the compass in their positioning in the landscape they use a limited language of materials and form that were influenced by his time spent working in California with Richard Neutra. They are Californian modernist pavilions in the Suffolk landscape.
Beach House is John Penn’s most uncompromising design in terms of idea as form. The film combines an archive film made by Penn himself on completion of the house with experimental sound recordings made during the same period and material recently filmed in the house to explore a convergence of filmic and architectural language and allow the viewer to piece together Beach House in its past and present forms. More info…
http://emilyrichardson.org.uk/
Images: courtesy of Emily Richardson and LUX, London.
Bringing the Video Days event programme to a close, we’re excited to welcome Elijah for a talk and Q&A on Tuesday 15 May, from 6.30 pm – 8.30 pm.
Elijah is a DJ and promoter, and along with Skilliam, co-founder of the grime record label Butterz. In these various roles Elijah has travelled the world and shared stages with some of grime’s biggest names. For six years he hosted his own grime show on Rinse FM. Over the past year Elijah has been Associate Artistic Director at Lighthouse Arts, Brighton, an arts and culture agency producing, supporting and presenting new art, film, music, design and games. Supported by Arts Council England, this initiative promotes diversity in the arts, of which, in the UK, only a small percent of artistic directors are black and minority ethnic.
In 2014, grime began to dominate popular music. In 2015, the Tottenham-based MC Skepta beat both David Bowie and Radiohead to the Mercury Prize. When Stormzy re-recorded the single “Shut Up”, originally a viral YouTube video, it entered the 2015 Christmas UK Singles Chart at number eighteen. Since then, grime has soundtracked the so-called ‘youthquake’ that, among other things, has been credited with blocking Theresa May and the Conservatives’ hoped-for landslide in last year’s general election. Grime is the music of a generation.
As well as plotting his own experience of working in grime, by which a history of grime will emerge, Elijah’s talk will address the interrelations between visual art and music culture. He will discuss the importance of inquisitiveness and creativity in work and explore how applying organisational skills learnt in the arts and culture sector could be used in music programming, and vice versa.
Elijah’s lecture will be followed by a Q+A, hosted by Jonathan P. Watts.
Ashley Holmes’ film Everybody’s Hustling will be played on loop all day on Tuesday 15 May, from 10 am to 5 pm, then played once at the start of this event.
» Find out more about Video Days Week Five screenings.
Images: courtesy of Elijah / Butterz