Evening Course: From Programming to Curating

2 May, 2017
– 16 May, 2017
6pm – 9pm
LUX
Waterlow Park Centre
The Inoperative Community Installation

New evening course exploring the historical, conceptual and critical relationships between film programming for the cinema and screening room, and curating film and video for the gallery. 

Participants on this short course, led by curator and writer Dan Kidner, will look at the historical trajectory from the programming of experimental film and video for cinemas and screening rooms to the exhibition of that same work in galleries and museums. We will also critically reflect on the recent tendency for artists to make long narrative film and video for the gallery.
Over three evening sessions, we will discuss the work of distributors of avant-garde film in the 1970s, and seminal exhibitions of film and video since the 1980s, as well as important critical texts that reflect on the key issues. Each session will feature a screening, in addition to a talk and a seminar.


Dan Kidner is a curator and writer. He was previously Director of Picture This, Bristol (2011 – 2013), and Director of City Projects, London (2004 – 2011). Over the past 10 years he has produced projects by many artists including Knut Åsdam, Anja Kirschner and David Panos, Cara Tolmie, Emily Wardill, James Richards and Jimmy Robert. His books include, with Petra Bauer, Working Together: British Film Collectives in the 1970s (2013) and with George Clark and James Richards, A Detour Around Infermental (2011). He writes regularly for Frieze and other magazines and journals. He most recently curated the exhibitions The Inoperative Community, Raven Row (3 December 2015 to 14 February 2016) and Rozdzielona Wspólnota (The Inoperative Community II), Muzeum Sztuki, Łódź, Poland (20 May to 28 August 2016).

We will discuss film and video distribution and exhibition practices since the 1960s through the lens of a number of Dan Kidner’s recent exhibition and production projects. We will pay particular attention to the distribution of avant-garde and experimental film in the 1970s, and video art in the 1980s.

This session will focus on the black box phenomenon of the 1990s and examine how new technologies of projection initially privileged certain types of works over others. We will also look at the more recent trend towards gallery exhibitions of the work of film directors such as Chantal Akerman, Chris Marker, Harun Farocki and Apichatpong Weerasethakul.

In this final session we will discuss how cinema has been both object and subject for artists working with film and video, and the more recent phenomenon of curators programming films made for the cinema or the screening room in the spaces of art. Looking at the complex ways in which the two institutions and histories of visual art and cinema are interwoven, we will discuss exhibitions about cinema such Spellbound, Hayward Gallery, London, Cinéma Cinéma, Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, the Netherlands, and ‘Art and Film Since 1945: Hall of Mirrors’ at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. Also in this session will we look at the importance of the film festival circuit for practices that straddle cinema and art.

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