Sets and Scenarios
In recent years, the development of media has transformed the way we experience moving images. Sets and Scenarios explores our heightened proximity to images and what it means to live under their influence. From 15 until 21 June, we invite you to navigate a programme that unfolds in three acts, intervals and daily evening screenings.
Commissions by Eva Gold and Adam Christensen delve into notions of control, perversity, desire and heartache. Through text and repurposed film footage, Eva Gold devises scenes of obsessive voyeurism, unravelling how film permeates our dreams and the depth of our psyche. Adam Christensen invites the audience to a performance for the camera in his house-cum-baroque-theatrical-stage, obscuring distinctions between on- and off-set.
In times of reduced mobility, commissions by Aaron Ratajczyk and Thuy-Han Nguyen-Chi find motion between images. Aaron Ratajczyk stages a one-to-one rehearsal via video call – the screen as proxy to corporeal normalcy – while movements in time and history are proposed by Thuy-Han Nguyen-Chi’s multi-layered films. Presented through a fictitious map, the works expand into a rhizomatic network of different media.
Every evening, Sets and Scenarios presents a screening of moving image works that expand our exploration of the relationship between viewer and screen as images penetrate retina and ear, before creeping beneath the skin, towards the flesh, muscles and viscera. The screening programme features works and contributions by Sidsel Meineche Hansen, Shahryar Nashat, James Richards and Steve Reinke, Deborah Stratman, Cerith Wyn Evans and others to be announced soon.
Sets and Scenarios is curated by Jade Barget, Angela Blanc, Charlotte dos Santos, Panos Fourtoulakis, Sha Li, Yi-Ning Lin and Lindsey Wiercioch as part of the MA Curating Contemporary Art Programme Graduate Projects 2020, Royal College of Art, London, in partnership with Nottingham Contemporary.
Adam Christensen is a London-based artist whose practice is realised through performance, moving image, textile, music and installation. Adam’s performances are based on his immediate experiences, coloured by the theatricality of the everyday, the spectacle of domesticity, chance encounters and emotional and physical dramas. Adam has previously exhibited at Overgaden Institute of Contemporary Art, Copenhagen; Baltic Triennial 13, Vilnius, Tallinn and Riga; Institute of Contemporary Arts, London; and Goldsmiths Centre for Contemporary Art, London. He also performs with music project Ectopia.
Eva Gold is a London-based artist who works across sculpture, installation, video and writing, often combined in a process of fragmented storytelling. Eva Gold navigates feelings of desire and disgust, and their uncomfortable proximity. Locating a space in which these two meet, she identifies the emotional threshold where arousal tips over into horror. Eva’s practice raises questions about desire in public and private domains, agency, vulnerability, and consent. Eva Gold graduated from Goldsmiths College in 2016 and the Royal Academy Schools in 2019. She recently completed a commission for Parrhesiades, part of which was presented at Goldsmiths Centre for Contemporary Art, London.
Thuy-Han Nguyen-Chi is a Berlin- and London- based artist whose practice mutates in and out of sculpture, installation, moving image and interdisciplinary research. Her work explores imaginations of freedom at the intersection of film-making and film theory, critical refugee studies and postcolonial studies, personal/prosthetic memory and individual/collective histories. In September 2020, Thuy-Han will begin pursuing PhD research in film at the University of Westminster. She has previously exhibited and screened her work at Atletika, Vilnius; Centro di Musica Contemporanea di Milano, Milan; Gene Siskel Film Center, Chicago; Kunstverein Nürnberg, Nürnberg; Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt; Portikus, Frankfurt; Sàn Art, Saigon; University of Bonn, Bonn, among other venues.
Aaron Ratajczyk is a London- and Berlin-based artist whose working practice is realised through moving image, text and performance. He graduated with a BA in Dance, Context, Choreography at HZT / University of the Arts Berlin and is currently completing an MFA in Fine Arts at Goldsmiths College, London. Aaron’s performances have been presented at the Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw; KEM, Warsaw; Yvonne Lambert, Berlin; Arti et Amicitiae, Amsterdam; NDC, Bucharest; Veem House for Performance, Amsterdam; and Import Projects, Berlin, among other venues.
Event:
Sets and ScenariosDates:
15 Jun 2020 – 21 Jun 2020View Full Programme:
https://setsandscenarios.co.uk/