Mainstream 2.1

Featuring works by Laure Prouvost, Margaret Salmon, Maria Marshall, Yaron Lapid, Fred Lindberg, Charlie Tweed, Erica Scourti. With a live operatic intermission 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. minounorouzi.com

Monolog | Laure Prouvost | UK 2009 | Video | 9 min

A self-referential punk rock comment on the relationship between maker and viewer. Monolog gets its strength from a delirious honesty, and is also refreshingly unacademic. Courtesy of Laure Prouvost and LUX, London.

P.S. | Margaret Salmon | UK 2002 | Video | 8 min

Anger and frustration are often expressed with repetitious utterings. Here a couple arguing forms the 1st filmic portrait in Salmon’s series of American typographies. The near inaudibility of the soundtrack adds to the sense of despair, whilst visually P.S. weaves together iconography from a range of film genres including classic Hollywood films from the 40s, and New Deal documentaries.

Puzzle Fit | Maria Marshall | UK 2002 | Video | 1 min 50s

At a kids party, dressed as a Saturday Night Fever type disco, a dating game ensues in which the girls energetically plot fantasy futures, establishing a hierarchy of wants, whilst the boys remain fairly passive.

You Have Not Found His Riddle | Yaron Lapid | Israel 2003 | Video | 12 min 40s

A seventy-year-old man living in Israel wants to die. But death does not want him.
A charming, absurdist, loveable piece.

Notes II | Charlie Tweed | UK 2009 | Video | 8 min 10s

In Notes II, part of a video series, Charlie Tweed continues his exploration of control methodologies by testing the boundaries of control desires, and control solutions. The series consists of “video transmissions” that are paranoid dispatches sent from anonymous groups and are part-instructional films and part-manifestos for survival.

How to Handle a Brief Encounter | Fred Lindberg | Sweden 2010 | Video | 2 min 54s

Playing with the spectators willingness to be turned on – the ‘pornography of intimacy’, a term coined by Tony Dowmunt, is realized here as a ridiculous and desperately funny condition of mankind.

Citizen Choice | Erica Scourti | UK 2010 | Digital video | 5 min 33s

Positive thinking podcasts covering everything from prosperity to successful relationships, are cut together and accompanied by stock videos to tell an obsessive compulsive story of freedom of choice, and self-actualization.