Nottingham Contemporary

Selected5 is a new curated programme of artists’ film and video touring throughout 2015 to some of the UK’s leading venues for showcasing artists’ film.

Drawn from nominations put forward by the artists shortlisted for the 2014 Film London Jarman Award, Selected 5 brings together some of the most outstanding work from early career moving image artists working in the UK.

Programme:

Rigged – Kate Cooper, 2014, 4:28 mins

Through an extensive use of CGI techniques commercial photography and post-production, the film Rigged highlights the labour inherent in the creation of images, looking at the position the female body has occupied in the history of digital image technology. Through the creation and re-rendering of images of the body, Cooper asks how these digital figures might perform in our place made real as downloadable, ultra-realised bodies.

The Extra’s Ever Moving Lips– Lucy Clout, 2014, 7:40mins

The Extra’s Ever Moving Lips, understands the creation of visual and literal wittering (represented in the work via an Australian soap opera) as comfort, context and intimacy. In the piece, two forensic-lipreaders try to transcribe the speech of an extra in the background of a 20 year old soap. This close reading of the background of a necessarily disposable medium is a way of examining the repercussions of speaking/acting/making in a time when technology allows the recording, replaying and storage of most every action. The work is interested in the morality of holding someone to their every word, particularly in a domestic situation.

GottMitUns– Niels Bugge, 2013, 7:50 mins

GottmitUns follows the mutations of the eagle appropriated as a Prussian state emblem, alongside footage from the zoological gardens of Glasgow and Edinburgh.

Memory Theatre –Tom Lock, 2012, 4:45 mins

Memory Theatre takes as its starting point a personal reflection on my memory of cartoons, films, online videos and music. The material used in the work ranges from reflections on my childhood in the 80's through to the present day. Collage and cut up techniques run throughout the editing creating confusing and psychedelic relationships within the visual and sonic content. Video is broken down through pixelation whilst layers of imagery, sound and live action are merged together.

Friendly Things from the Future – Nicholas Brooks, 2014, 14 mins

Filmed in Hualien,Taiwan, Friendly Things from the Future imagines an interface with the future as both physical and mental construct. China's 2011 ban on television and film representations of time travel leaves its close neighbour with a curious advantage – the liberty of exploring non-linear ideas of time. The cyclical nature of time inferred from Taoism, the water cycles that provide Taiwan's tropical climate and the nation's position in the global technology supply chain are threads the film's narrative draws upon. As is the nature of Hualien's main industry: the manipulation and cutting of stone.

The only way she could ever look good is with distance – Richard Sides, 2011, 8 mins

The only way she could ever look good is with distance​was originally devised as a live performance in front of a ​video​ camera and through a video mixer. In the background things get held up - foregrounded by a sequence of video and sound. Here, the background character gazes ​arbitrarily​to the foreground and responds.

You’re Dead to Me – Min-Wei Ting, 2014, 14 mins

You’re Dead to Me takes us to Singapore, into a tranquil cemetery sprawled across a dense, unruly tropical forest. We encounter a solitary, anonymous figure who sleeps on graves and wanders through the lush forest as if in search of something. The lone, mysterious character marks a sense of isolation and his movements signal a final communion with the forest and the dead before they vanish.

A Rat Biting Another Rat – Anita Delaney, 2015, 4:17 mins

A Rat Biting Another Rat is an affective collage. Comprised of rapidly edited actors, objects, text and sound, the work swings between the violent and dripping, the sweet and risible. The work is exemplary of the interest in aesthetics and affect at the core of Delaney’s practice which looks at fictions and strategies for how to live as a weakling. A Rat Biting Another Rat seeks a personal relationship with the viewer through text and speech. The work wants to be intimate with its audience and insinuate a partnership.

Cannibals – Lucy Beech, 2013, 14:36 mins

Cannibals was developed out of research around the online community - ‘Women Empowering Women’ an all-female support group that adopted the ethos of self-change. Therapeutic discourses were transformed in this context into a vehicle for a non-sustainable business model. WEW emerges in Cannibals as a pyramid scheme; a microcosm of a capitalist system mirroring an image of unsustainable growth. Here notions of female empowerment operate as an authoritative branding tool. Before they eat, the women participate in ‘emotional circuit training’; the body is ‘tenderised’ in preparation for self-consumption. The fictional process deteriorates when one of the participants observes this pseudo-therapeutic process to be eating away at itself.

Selected 5 is produced by videoclub and Film London Artists’ Moving Image Network, and is supported by Arts Council England and Film London.

Thanks to CCA Glasgow, Fabrica, Nottingham Contemporary, CIRCA Projects, Whitechapel Gallery and FACT.