Screening and discussion to launch a new poster produced by artists Margaret Salmon and Rhea Storr (commissioned by LUX Scotland) which acts as a celebration of and instruction guide to loading 16mm film on a Bolex camera. A free copy will be available for everyone who attends the event. For this event, Salmon and Storr have selected one of each other’s films and the screening will be followed by a discussion chaired by LUX Director Benjamin Cook on the ideas behind the poster project and the present and future of 16mm filmmaking.
A Protest, A Celebration, A Mixed Message, Rhea Storr (2018, 12 min)
Celebration is protest at Leeds West Indian Carnival. By exploring the spectator and performer roles enacted through carnival, the film considers structures of power in masquerade. Following Mama Dread’s, a troupe whose carnival theme is Caribbean immigration to the UK, we are asked to consider the visibility of black bodies in the city. A costumed body navigates what it means to be mixed race in the rural and the way in which mixed-race bodies are read.
The film is the winner of the inaugural Louis Le Prince Experimental Film Prize and won best artist film at Aesthetica Short Film Festival 2019.
Mm, Margaret Salmon (2017, 30 min)
Part feminist linguistic investigation, part child’s learning tool and celebration of motorsport, a voice-over of words and associations narrates 35mm verité footage of the Berwick Bandits, an all-male Speedway motorcycle team with the mantra ‘No Brakes, No Gears, No Fear’.
Rhea Storr
Rhea Storr makes films about Black and mixed-race identities, asking where images fail or resist us. Recent themes include masquerade and Black bodies in rural spaces. She often works on 16mm film whilst making peripheral drawings and photographs. Recent screenings include National Museum of African American History and Culture, US, European Media Art Festival, Hamburg International Short Film Festival, Kassel Doc Fest, Berwick Film and Media Art Festival and ‘Get Up Stand Up Now’, Somerset House, UK. She runs the 16mm film lab at not nowhere artist workers’ co-operative, London.
Margaret Salmon
Margaret Salmon (b. 1975, New York) lives and works in Glasgow. Concerned with a shifting constellation of relations, such as those between camera and subject, human and animal, or autobiography and ethnography, Margaret Salmon’s films often examine the gendered, emotive dynamics of social interactions and representational forms. Solo exhibitions of her work have been held at institutions including DCA (2018/19), Tramway (2018) Staatsgalerie Stuttgart (2015); Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, USA (2011); Witte de With Centre for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam (2007); Whitechapel Art Gallery, London (2007) and Collective Gallery, Edinburgh (2006). Her work has been featured in film festivals and major international survey exhibitions, including the Berlin Biennale (2010) and Venice Biennale (2007) London Film Festival (2018, 2016, 2014). Salmon won the inaugural MaxMara Art Prize for Women in 2006, was recently shortlisted for the Jarman Award 2018 and the 2019 Margaret Tait Award.
