Artists’ film has moved from the art scene’s fringes into the limelight over the past two decades. Film and Video Umbrella where Keith Whittle worked from 1994-2005, has since the mid-90s been at the forefront of commissioning and touring artists’ moving image works now shown in gallery and museum exhibitions internationaly, and several of its commissioned artists have been recognised by UK’s prestigious Turner Prize art award, with Michael Landy and Elizabeth Price being awarded for film works in 2008 and 2013 respectively.
At Film and Video Umbrella, he was initially involved in touring programmes of work by notable artists such as Vito Acconci, Marina Abramović & Ulay, Gary Hill and Bill Viola. Concurrently work of emerging artists exploring the medium, including Cheryl Donegan, Douglas Gordon, Gillian Wearing, Sam Taylor-Wood, and Vanessa Beecroft.
Later, the commissioning of national touring exhibitions that showcased UK-based artists working in moving image, including projects with several YBA artists who enlivened London’s contemporary art scene in the 1990s.
Produced and curated by Film and Video Umbrella, in partnership with major galleries and cultural institutions. These solo and group exhibitions include the highlights; Cinerama by Turner Prize nominee and British artist-filmmaker Isaac Julien, Parade by Turner Prize winner Mark Leckey, A Free and Anonymous Monument by Jane and Louise Wilson, and Looking for Alfred by renowned Belgian artist Johan Grimonprez, who explores the legacy of Alfred Hitchcock, and Tomorrow World, Yesterday’s Fever (Mental Guests Incorporated) by Abigail Lane.
An ongoing passion continued through recent curated exhibitions including work by Derek Jarman, Sutapa Biswas, John Akomfrah and Turner Prize winner Laure Prouvost, among others.
Sir Isaac Julien
Vagabondia
One of today’s most prominent and influential figures in media art and film, Isaac Julien is an award winning British installation artist, filmmaker and Distinguished Professor of the Arts at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His multi-channel installations, documentaries, and photographs explore Black and queer histories and identities. Julien gained international attention for his iconic film Looking for Langston (1989), a montage that reimagines the life of poet, novelist, and playwright Langston Hughes during the Harlem Renaissance. Julien’s works emerge from in-depth investigations of history, blurring the barriers between film, dance, photography, music, theatre, painting, and sculpture.
Julien’s Vagabondia (2000), commissioned by Film and Video Umbrella, where Keith Whittle worked from 1994-2005, is a two channel installation exploring how structures of power and domination impact historical narratives in museums. Set in London’s Sir John Soane’s Museum, which the architect designed in the early nineteenth century to house his collection of art and artefacts, the video shows a Black female conservator as she moves around the museum at night imagining the ghosts of eighteenth-century Black London. Julien’s video evokes a world of mirrors and shadows and features a dancing “vagabond” figure who animates a room designed to display William Hogarth’s 1732–34 morality tale A Rake’s Progress. For Julien, the vagabond highlights the ways the museum’s collection has benefitted from colonial exploitation. Julien employs a Creole voiceover to tell the story, representing the complex identities comprising this history.
Vagabondia was commissioned for the exhibition Retrace Your Steps: Remember Tomorrow curated by Hans-Ulrich Obrist and Cerith Wyn Evans at London’s Sir John Soane’s Museum. Made in collaboration with the dancer and choreographer Javier de Frutos, Vagabondia was later presented in an exhibition entitled Cinerama, alongside another major work by the duo, the three-screen installation, The Long Road to Mazatlan nominated for the Turner Prize in 2000.
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Isaac Julien CBE RA (b. 1960, London) has been honoured with solo shows at the Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase, New York; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Art Institute of Chicago; Museum Brandhorst, Munich; and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; among many others. His work is represented in prestigious collections such as the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Tate Modern; UK Government Art Collection; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; Museum Brandhorst, Munich; Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami; and de la Cruz Collection, Miami.
Vagabondia is a Film and Video Umbrella commissioned production as part of the project Cinerama, initiated in partnership with Cornerhouse, with funding from the National Touring Programme of Arts Council England. Additional support was provided by the British Council and Dance Umbrella.
With thanks to London Film and Video Development Agency, Victoria Miro Gallery and Rosa de la Cruz. The Long Road To Mazatlan was commissioned by Artpace, Texas and Grand Arts, Kansas City, with additional support from London Arts Board and the Arts Council England.
Johan Grimonprez
Looking for Alfred
Johan Grimonprez is a Belgian multimedia artist, filmmaker, and curator who studied at the School of Visual Arts and attended the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program in New York. Grimonprez achieved international acclaim with his film essay, dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y. With its premiere at Centre Pompidou in Paris, France and Documenta X in 1997, it eerily foreshadowed the events of September 11th. The film tells the story of airplane hijackings since the 1970s and how these changed the course of news reporting. The movie consists of recycled images taken from news broadcasts, Hollywood movies, animated films and commercials. As a child of the first TV generation, the artist mixes reality and fiction in a new way and presents history as a multi-perspective dimension open to manipulation.
His film, Looking for Alfred (2005), commissioned by Film and Video Umbrella where Keith Whittle worked from 1994-2005, plays with the theme of the double through simulations and reversals. The point of departure is the film director Alfred Hitchcock and his legendary guest appearances in his own films. Innumerable Hitchcock doppelgangers act out a mysterious game of confusion in which Hitchcock meets Hitchcock. This puzzling game of confusion also pays tribute to the pictorial cosmos of the Surrealist painter René Magritte. Looking for Alfred won the International Media Award (ZKM, Germany) in 2005 as well as the European Media Award in 2006. His full-length feature, Double Take, 2009, received the Black Pearl Award at the Abu Dhabi film festival, a Spirit Award, and was an official selection of both the Berlin and Sundance Film Festivals.
With the aid of Hitchcock impersonators, Looking for Alfred weaves an unexpected narrative from Hitch’s fifty-year trail of cameo appearances in his own films. Shot amongst the atmospheric interiors of the Palais des Beaux Arts in Brussels, and making the most of the distinctive architecture of this unique location, Grimonprez’s cinematic twists and turns echo the trademark manner of the Master of Suspense while at the same time radiating a quiet and beguiling surrealism reminiscent of that other great modernist maestro, René Magritte. Alongside the film itself, in which ‘Hitch’ is pursued by a number of shadowy doppelgängers, the project consists of a multiplicity of elements, including storyboard drawings and casting photographs, plus behind-the-scenes footage of screen tests in New York, London and Los Angeles that documents Grimonprez’s search for the perfect Hitchcock look-alike.
Grimonprez’s work is included in numerous international collections such as the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France; the Kanazawa Art Museum, Japan; the National Gallery, Berlin, Germany; and the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Denmark. His curatorial projects have been hosted at major museums worldwide such as the Whitney Museum in New York; The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in California; The Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich, Germany; and the Tate Modern in London, England. Grimonprez achieved international acclaim with his film essay dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y at Documenta X in Kassel, Germany, in 1997, which eerily foreshadowed the tragic events of September 11th in New York. His films have been included in prestigious film festivals around the globe, including New York, Edinburgh, Telluride, Los Angeles, Rio de Janeiro, Tokyo and Berlin. In 2016, Grimonprez’s most recent feature length film, Shadow World, won Best Documentary Feature Film at the Edinburgh International Film Festival, Edinburgh, Scotland and at the 61st International Film Festival of Valladolid, Spain.
Looking for Alfred is a Film and Video Umbrella/Zapomatik co-production. In association with Palais des Beaux-Arts Brussels, The Photographers’ Gallery and Anna Sanders Films.
Made possible by the Flemish Audiovisual Fund and Arts Council England. Additional support from Deitch Projects, Riksutstillinger – The National Touring Exhibitions Norway, Yvon Lambert Gallery, Media Space Inc., Victoria and Productiehuis Rotterdam (Rotterdamse Schouwburg).
Abigail Lane
Tomorrow World, Yesterday’s Fever (Mental Guests Incorporated)
Abigail Lane is adept at loosely stitched narratives, and the inspiration for her work is drawn from a wide range of personal interests. Subjects such as natural and medical history, games, magic, the circus, and various miscellaneous events inform her installations, which are made up of various elements related to each other in convoluted ways. They exude an atmosphere of the uncanny and display a dark sense of humour.
Her installations are often made up of scenes haunted by bodies, generally represented as figurative fragments, resembling sacred relics, medically documented amputations, prostheses or even morbidly crime scenes.
In her embroidered works, numerous threads are left to dangle. As with the rest of her work, where nothing seems permanent or definitive, everything is captured in a state of transition, caught in flux, blood flowing from wounds, indepictions of the fragility of life itself.
For her exhibition, Tomorrow’s World, Yesterday’s Fever (Mental Guests Incorporated), commissioned by Film and Video Umbrella where Keith Whittle worked from 1994-2005. British artist Abigail Lane presented a trilogy of theatrical video installations comprising The Figment, The Inclination, and The Inspirator. The exhibition extended Abigail Lane’s preoccupation with the fantastical, the Gothic, and the uncanny through a trio of arresting and theatrical installations based on film projections.
Lane is well known for her large-scale inkpads, wallpaper made with body prints, wax casts of body fragments and ambiguous installations. In these earlier works, Lane emphasized the physical marking of the body, often referred to as traces or evidence. In this exhibition, Lane turns inward giving form to the illusive and intangible world of the psyche. Coupled with her long-standing fascination with turn-of-the-century phenomena such as séances, freak shows, circusand magic acts, Lane creates a “funhouse-mirror reflection” of the life of the mind.
The Figment explores the existence of instinctual urges that lie deep within us. Bathed in a vivid red light, the impish boy-figment beckons us, “Hey, do you hear me…I’m inside you, I’m yours…..I’m here, always here in the dark, I am the dark, your dark… and I want to play….”. A mischievous but not sinister “devil on your shoulder” who taunts and tempts us to join him in his wicked game. The female protagonist of The Inclination is almost the boy-figment’s antithesis. Emerging from the dawn glow of an ocean shoreline this fragile, ghostly siren entreats us to follow her as she lights her way, slowly up the beach. The film is accompanied by a haunting soundtrack, composed for Lane by DJ and Producer, Matty Skylab. The more playful The Inspirator features the surreal vision of a panda playing a trumpet in the depths of a forest. The poster declares, “Her mind was a WILDERNESS, her world a WASTELAND and then from nowhere HE RETURNED”. This whimsical and unexpected creative spirit smiles fleetingly on those he favours before disappearing, leaving only the outline of his grin. A glitter ball and mirrored fountain create a magical but unworldly fairground setting to accompany the Inspirator’s celluloid world.
Abigail Lane (b. 1967, Cornwall, England) studied fine arts at Goldsmiths College, where she played an important role in the exhibition Freeze, organized in 1988 by Damien Hirst and considered as marking the beginning of the Young British Artists movement, of which Lane is seen as a key figure. In a career spanning over 30 years, she has been exhibited on numerous occasions in the UK (the ICA, Whitechapel Gallery, Serpentine Gallery, Hayward Gallery…) as well as across the whole of Europe (Pompidou Centre in Paris, the Lyon Biennale, the Castello di Rivoli in Turin, Portikus in Frankfurt, the Bonnefanten Museum in Maastricht, the CAN in Neuchâtel, etc.) and in the USA (the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York…). She has lived and worked in Suffolk since 2007.
Tomorrow’s World, Yesterday’s Fever (Mental Guests Incorporated) was a Milton Keynes Gallery / Film and Video Umbrella collaboration. It was subsequently shown at the Victoria Miro Gallery, London, from October – November 2001.