Programme

Selected by artist Paul Rooney
(Northern Art Prize winner 2008)

Memory Awake is a collection of seven short films by contemporary artists which speculate on ideas of social memory. The artists use widely differing methods in engaging with historical remembrance, but their works all share a poetic or subjective approach.

Many artists are currently making short films rather than producing paintings or sculptures. Their films do not always tell stories or involve actors. They are making moving images with verbal soundtracks. These artists are experimenting with the medium and producing a different type of experience for the viewer than that presented in most films made for the cinema or TV. The films are impressionistic evocations, rather than narrative entertainments.

The programme of seven films is shown in two parts.

Part I
3-16 November
Nelson Bourrec-Carter The Fog Thicker
Rebecca Davies Eric
Allan Hughes Point of Audition

In The Fog Thicker by Nelson Bourrec Carter, three women search for a long-lost house and drive into a pleasant fog. Rebecca Davies’ film remembers the life of Eric with shots of Skegness, a funeral parlour, and a working men’s club. Allan Hughes’ video, Point of Audition, features an actress attempting to lip-sync a transcript from Jane Fonda’s 1972 Radio Hanoi broadcasts, and highlights the difficulties of reconstructing any historical narrative.

Part II
17 November - 1 December
Valentina Ferrandes The Oyster Effect
Lisa Byrne Taxi III
Mario Pfeifer Reconsidering The new Industrial Parks near Irvine, California by Lewis Baltz, 1974
Holly Antrum Movement in a Minor Familiar

InThe Oyster Effect, Valentina Ferrandes collages several voice-overs in different languages to accompany film of Italian architectural interiors, a car journey in heavy rain, and women in altered states of consciousness. In Taxi III, Lisa Byrne compiles interviews with taxi drivers who reveal, through their direct accounts of violence, the historical scars of the Northern Irish experience. Mario Pfeifer's film, Reconsidering The new Industrial Parks near Irvine, California by Lewis Baltz, 1974, is inspired by a book of photographs of industrial buildings from the 1970s. It uses a continuous shot through one of the buildings, along with voice-over comments by its current occupants, to consider the role of photography as record. Holly Antrum poetically evokes the life of an eastern european in the UK, through shots of domestic interiors and an untranslated voice-over, in Movement in a Minor Familiar (Schubert tape).



Images:
Valentina Ferrandes (road); Holly Antrum (violin)(clock); Nelson Bourrec Carter (ear-ring)

Dates: 3rd November 2011 – 1st December 2011
Opening Times: Tuesday-Saturday 11am-5pm.
Thursday until 8.30pm
Tickets: Free.
Each part lasts about 35 minutes.
Visitors can enter at any time.