Wild Thinking & Mainstream 2.1
10 Jun – 9 Dec 2011
Various venues
Wild Thinking
Friday June 10th 9pm,
Apt 401, Sheffield
Wild Thinking brings together self-referential punk rock comments, experiments in doorknob fellatio, and a man who wants death, without death wanting him. Featuring works by Margaret Salmon, Luke Fowler and Anna McLauchlan, Laure Prouvost, Maria Marshall, Erica Scourti, Harold Offeh, Charlie Tweed , Behrooz Karamizade, Sharone Lifschitz, Fred Lindberg, Yaron Lapid.
Friday 9 December 6 – 9pm
Angus-Hughes Gallery
26 Lower Clapton Rd
, London, E5 0PD
With live operatic intermissions by The Society of Imaginary Friends.
Mainstream 2.1 presents a series of artists’ films brought together by their varying strategies in the use of actuality as a material object. Much variation can be sited in how artists and filmmakers approach the use of actuality as a creative, political, and philosophical means for art production. Embedded in these works, dialogues and playful critiques can be found of the documentary form, documentation, performance and spectatorship. Perhaps in a way similar to the Hitchcockian principle approach to actors as object material “willing to be utilised and wholly integrated”, it could be suggested that here actuality, meaning documentary material itself is the material object used to underpin an artistic authority in the pursuit of a captive audience. This ‘authority’ exists not only in bodily presence and performance documentations as in Laure Prouvost, Fred Lindberg or Harold Offeh’s work, but also in concept as in Erica Scourti’s use of unauthorised archive material, a pastiche on ‘becoming’, or Margaret Salmon’s seemingly covert recording of a couple’s domestic argument. Providing an altogether more sensory experience for the spectator, these artists provide landscapes of discomfort, which draw in, charm, seduce and repel. – Minou Norouzi
Selected by Minou Norouzi, moving image artist and co-organiser of Sheffield Fringe. A previous iteration of this programme was screened in Sheffield, Wild Thinking, June 2011.
