Love in a Cold Climate, Michael Curran (2002)

This exhibition has ended. 

To mark the Winter Solstice LUX presents Michael Curran’s 2002 feature length film Love in a Cold Climate, a highly personal mediation on coldness and love. The film was the last work to be produced at the former Lux Centre, and was completed even as staff and furniture were being removed from the building. Produced in a time before widespread access to the internet and just before the introduction of the iPhone and YouTube the film was painstakingly researched and developed through Curran’s network of friends and contacts via letters and answerphone messages. Filmed on his camcorder, often with people he met in bars and nightclubs in the Shoreditch area in which the Lux Centre was based (itself on the brink of a massive gentrification and transformation which ultimately closed down the Lux) the film documents a strange transitional moment both in the city and in moving image culture.

Taking the form of a fractured journey the work explores notions of coldness, the act of storytelling and loneliness, all haunted by the spectre of Hans Christian Anderson’s Snow Queen. Whilst seeking the actress Natayla Klimova, who played the role of the Snow Queen in Grennadi Kazinski’s 1966 LENFILM production, the artist drifts through a series of episodic encounters which all strangely reflect upon his concerns. Comprised of telephone recitations, fairy story, chance meetings and weather changes Love in a Cold Climate emerges as an essay in love and longing.

Michael Curran was born in 1963 in Scotland. He studied at Goldsmiths College, London, Duncan of Jordanstone, Dundee and Jan Van Eyck Akademie, Maastricht. He now lives and works in London.

You can also read an illustrated talk that Michael Curran gave at the premiere of the film in 2003 at the National Film Theatre in London.