UPCOMING EVENTS AND OPENINGS

In the LUX Screening Room this week: Soul in a White Room, Simon Hartog (1968)

1. 5 February - 10 March, Resistance Domination Secret, Mark Aerial Waller at Cell Project Space

2. 7 February 1.45pm Serpentine Cinema: William Raban and Amy Granat at the Gate Cinema

3. 7 February 4.30pm Dan Graham’s Rock My Religion (An Expanded Screening) at Auto Italia South East

4. 10 February - 27 March, Emily Wardill, Game Keepers Without Game at The Showroom

5. 10 February 7pm, Vertigo: Farewell but not forgotten at The Horse Hospital

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LUX SCREENING ROOM

Soul in a White Room, Simon Hartog (1968), a rare underground film from the early days of the London Filmmakers' Co-op
This week we present a rare short film from Simon Hartog, a founder member of the London Filmmaker's Co-operative and key figure in the UK independent film scene of the 60s-80s. The film also has historical interest as it features the back and hands of prominent black militant Omar Diop (who also appeared in Godard film's such as La Chinoise (1967)
http://bit.ly/a524hd

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1.
Cell Project Space
258 Cambridge Heath Road, London E2 9DA
info@cellprojects.org
www.cellprojects.org
+44(0)20 7241 3600

Mark Aerial Waller

RESISTANCE DOMINATION SECRET

Private View Friday 5th February 2010- 6.30-9.00pm
February 6th - March 10th 2010
Open 12-6pm Friday-Sunday

Working in video, sculpture and event based practices, Mark Aerial Waller provides both an interpretation and interruption of cinema history. With recourse to technological and narrative mechanisms, Waller stretches, reiterates and at times perverts the mainstream vocabulary of structure and dramatic staging. All of Waller’s practice requires viewers to be alert interpreters, able to respond, evaluate, judge, transform and be transformed. Through multiple types of sensory elements and devices, spectators are forced to think about how they get implicated and destabilised. Spectatorship is shaped into a psychological event that places the decentralised subject back inside the social situation. For Cell Project Space Waller will present ‘Resistance Domination Secret’ first exhibited in Paris in 2008 and later screened at the ICA as part of the Nought to Sixty Programme.

‘Resistance, Domination, Secret’ is an installation of 3 video works, each shot in three cities, Istanbul, Warsaw and London. Bringing together ancient and contemporary history, cult film and science fiction, the work is open to constant interpretations. Waller's trilogy is based loosely on the Oresteia, Aeschylus's trilogy of Greek tragedies centering on the murder of Trojan War hero Agamemnon by his wife Clytemnestra.

In the first piece ‘Resistance’ : Resistance Domination Secret, 2007 Waller unravels the plot in the Modern Port of Istanbul, divided by the Bosphorus and centered between Europe and Asia, drawing on the classical potency of the location. Waller visualises the murdered Agamemnon as a disembodied golden mask hovering ominously over hellish flames and chastising his wife from beyond the grave. This golden mask rotates within the installation as Waller's homemade mythological drama is spliced with clips from ‘Les Visiteurs du Soir’(1942), a film made by Marcel Carné during the French occupation, about a pair of 15th-century envoys, Giles and Dominique, sent by the devil to disrupt a wedding feast by seducing the bride and groom. The original film held a covert French Resistance subtext, produced under Nazi occupation during the 2nd World War. Their evil plan fails when one falls in love with his target, prompting the heroine to to enter a bitter existential conflict on the perversion of love. Some 2,000 years divide these two wartime dramas, but both seek to allegorise the violent rupture of a moral order, whether by bloodthirsty ancient warriors or the Nazis

Waller's second work, ‘Domination':The Flipside of Darkness , (2007), roughly corresponds to The Libation Bearers, the second of Aeschylus's plays. The setting has shifted to Warsaw's Palace of Culture and Science. This creates a link between the brutality of the Stalinist regime and that of ancient Greece. As with all Waller's videos, actors have been selected from friends and acquaintances, with an intentional disregard for polished professional acting technique. Furthermore the actors seem awkwardly amateurish and ill-suited to their roles, but paradoxically their failings seem to add sincerity and pathos to the mythological narrative. The murderous plotter, Orestes’s, South London intonation seems to contradict his mother, Clytemnestra's, thick Polish accent, however the maternal bond seems, however unlikely, curiously convincing. Waller develops several layers within this setting, the genre of television drama is sabotaged to reveal openness in an otherwise closed system. Classical mythology finds a new context where objects, landscapes and people compete for dominance in the symbolic order of the frame. With soundtrack by the band ‘Romvelope’

In the third piece ‘Secret’:The Children of the Night (2008) Waller heightens the curious connections of inconsistencies throughout the work by crafting bizarre cultural settings for his mythological characters, stripping bare the dramatic to a vertiginous tableau. Orestes is tormented by topless dancers, the Ancient Furies, who wish him torn to pieces. He faces judicial enquiries from the young gods; Apollo and Athena who bring wisdom hand in hand with draconian benevolence.

Finally in the backspace Waller presents ‘ A’ which exists as a key to the trilogy. Displaced heads are removed from Marcel Carné’s 1942 film ‘Les Visiteurs du Soir’. The surrealist vista, which is created, depicts the man, Giles, becoming an introspection of Dominique’s thoughts as he is cut from his background and is framed within Dominique’s profile.

Mark Aerial Waller is currently exhibiting a new solo project 'THE CASSIOPEIA PLAN' at Wysing Arts Centre, Cambridge until February 28th. http://www.wysingartscentre.org. Exhibitions include: Kafe Pitoresk: L’éxperience du Monde Visionnaire, (collaboration with Giles Round) at Serpentine Gallery, and solo pieces; For the Straight Way is Lost, 2nd Athens Biennale, Greece (2009), You have Not Been Honest, Museo D’Arte Contemporanea Donnaregina, Naples, Italy, British Council (2007) and La Societé des Amis de Judex II, Tate Modern, London (2007). His collaborative novel ‘Philip’, A speculative fiction with Cosmin Costinas, Rosemary Heather, Francis McKee, David Reinfurt, Steve Rushton, Heman Chong and Leif Magne Tangen, published by Project press, Dublin in 2007. Waller is also the founder of The Wayward Canon, a platform for event-based interventions in cinematic practices. Mark Aerial Waller's videos are distributed by LUX.

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2.
Serpentine Cinema: William Raban and Amy Granat

Sunday 7th Feb, 1.45pm

The Gate Cinema, 87 Notting Hill Gate

Tickets £6, Members, Students and Concessions, £5

We are delighted to continue our series of monthly screenings of artists’ films in collaboration with The Serpentine Gallery. This month sees William Raban and Amy Granat presenting a selection of their work. Final programme details are yet to be confirmed but will include a performance of ‘Take Measure’ by William Raban. For more information and to book tickets please go here: http://www.picturehouses.co.uk/news_item.aspx?venueId=gate&id=2080
William Raban's films are distributed by LUX.

Serpentine Cinema: CINACT is a series of monthly artists’ film screenings and events at The Gate. CINACT is named after American artist Henry Flynt’s 2007 cinema manifesto. Each programme focuses on two artists who investigate and experiment with the medium of cinema. It is a collaborative event with the Gate Cinema, The Serpentine Gallery and Sketch.

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3.
Dan Graham’s Rock My Religion
(An Expanded Screening)

Sun, 7 Feb 2010, 4.30pm

Auto Italia South East
1 Glengall Road
London
SE15 6NJ

http://www.autoitaliasoutheast.org/rockmyreligion.html

Dan Graham’s artistic practice has been influenced by music from early on and this interest becomes more explicit in the late 1960s through some of his first writings such as Live Kinks, 1969 a review of a concert by the Kinks. During the 70s and 80s, Graham developed close working relationships with composer Glenn Branca and musician and Sonic Youth founder Kim Gordon, who supposedly started her music career by taking part in one of Graham’s performance pieces, which didn’t quite go according to plan and turned into a fully fledged concert. Through “a shift towards the documentary” as described by LA MOCA’s Bennett Simpson who recently curated a Graham retrospective, the 1980s saw the release of two video works by the artist which explicitly deal with the subject of popular music: Minor Threat from 1983 on a concert of the American punk band of the same name and the more complex Rock My Religion (1982-84), developed in discussio ns with Branca, Gordon and Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore, all of whom contributing to the soundtrack of the work.

In Rock My Religion, Graham traces the history of popular music in America back to the 1950s, linking it with a 19th century Puritan sect, The Shakers. The bodies of the Puritan Shakers, reaching ecstasy in order to ‘overcome’ sexuality and to be closer to God, are juxtaposed with the shaking bodies of America’s pubescent teenagers, escaping their suburban prisons by immersing themselves in the sexually charged adoration of their pop idols – from Jerry Lee Lewis and Elvis to Jimmy Hendrix and Jim Morrison. For Graham, a study of popular music is intrinsically linked to an analysis of America’s political and social system constructed on the basis of a belief in the ‘American Dream’, a work ethic based on achievements of individuals and the nucleus of the traditional family. Whereas the Shakers’ aim was to create an equal society achieved through the elimination of sexual desires in the course of communal dancing, popul ar music allows the creation of a communal experience through the appreciation of individuals’ creative expressions. With Rock My Religion Graham investigates the idea of a relationship between 19th century industrialisation and America’s ‘suburbanisation’ in the 1950s, connecting this work to other pieces which show the artist’s continuous engagement with the semiology of suburban and urban architecture.

Rock My Religion is as much an experimental documentary as it is a theoretical discourse on American culture in the second half of the 20th century, making this work a visual extension of Graham’s writing practice rather than linking it with his works in video art. In contrast to the’ instantaneous presence’ experienced within closed-circuit video installations, Rock My Religion is an attempt to ‘extend time’. Linking the past with the present may be a way of accounting for popular music’s ability to occupy a space between the economy of a commercial industry and the realm of fantasies and desires.

This screening will contextualise Graham’s video-essay with readings of interviews, writings and music in order to expand on the influence of music on Graham’s work and to reflect on the importance of writing as part of his artistic practice.

Organised by Bettina Brunner


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4.
THE SHOWROOM
63 Penfold Street, NW8 8PQ
020 7724 4300
www.theshowroom.org
info@theshowroom.org

Wednesday - Saturday, 12 - 6 (closed 24/12/09 - 2/1/10)

Emily Wardill
Game Keepers Without Game
10 February - 27 March 2010

Preview: 9 February, 7-9pm, screening at 7pm
Opening hours: Wednesday - Saturday, screenings at 12pm, 1.30pm, 3pm and 4.30pm

The Showroom presents the London premiere of British artist Emily Wardill’s new work, Game Keepers Without Game, a powerful feature length film based on Life is a Dream (La Vida es Sueño) by Pedro Calderón de la Barca. The exhibition will also stage the development of Wardill’s new film, Fulll Firearms.

Game Keepers Without Game
The film translates the 17th century play by Calderón de la Barca into contemporary London; it tells the story of a girl put up for adoption by her family at a young age. When the girl is a teenager her father engineers a way for her to return to the family home, but her destructive response to the objects and people within leads to her being forcibly removed and having to strategise her way back into housing.

Set to a drumming soundtrack which highlights the spatial construction of the narrative, the film has a stark yet glossy aesthetic – the characters and objects are presented as if they are airline food, with no person or object touching another.

Fulll Firearms
The script for a new film will be developed during workshops staged by the artist and The Showroom. A group of actors will work collaboratively to create scenes through improvisation, acting, writing and editing. The developing film will be shown as a work in progress during the exhibition.

Emily Wardill (b.1977) is a London-based filmmaker. She has exhibited widely in the UK and internationally, including solo projects at Spacex, Exeter (2009); ICA, London (2008); Fortescue Avenue/Jonathan Viner, London (2005 and 2006); and STANDARD (OSLO) (2008). Her work has been screened at the Art Now Lightbox, Tate Britain; the International Short Film Festival, Oberhausen; Whitechapel Gallery, London; Witte de With, Rotterdam; and the London Film Festival. In 2008, Wardill was nominated for the Jarman Award and performed Life is a Dream at the Serpentine Gallery, London in 2007. Emily Wardill's films are distributed by LUX

Game Keepers Without Game has been supported by Spacex, Arts Council England, STANDARD (OSLO), De Appel, University of the Arts London and The Showroom. The exhibition at The Showroom is generously supported by The Henry Moore Foundation and Outset.

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5.
Vertigo: Farewell but not Forgotten…
Wednesday 10th February 2010, 7pm, The Horse Hospital
Colonnade (just behind Russell Square Tube Station), Bloomsbury, WC1

Readings, Films, DJ: FREE Admission – pay bar to cover our costs.

Dear friends and fellow travellers,
As you may know, Vertigo magazine is finally closing after 16 years charting independent, innovative, imaginative and internationalist moving image work in all its forms across the world. We close reluctantly, with many dedicated supporters - readers, writers, makers - but without the necessary financial assistance to continue and develop, despite numerous extended negotiations.

Eventually we aim to produce a book exploring the work Vertigo has charted. Firstly, however, we will host a farewell party to celebrate what has been achieved over the years in both the magazine and its numerous events / screenings.

We will be at The Horse Hospital near Russell Square from 7pm on 10th February and plan an evening of suitably independent world music from DJ Leon Parker, shortfilms and readings by a number of our esteemed contributors.

Thank You!
The Vertigo Team
www.vertigomagazine.co.uk