Alma Mater – Touring Programme

This year LUX’s annual touring programme of recent British video has been curated by ICA film curatorSteven Cairns. The programme includes work byStevenClaydon ,Torsten Lauschmann ,Clunie Reid,RachelReupke ,HannahSawtell andStephenSutcliffe . Alma Mater features work by six UK-based artists, dealing in representational methods of experience and social interaction. Alma Mater takes cultural identity as its starting point, to encompass the influence of visual culture on everyday experience; questioning ideas ofBritishness and conceptions of national identity. Working with digital media, each artist invests a degree of experimentation and innovation in their approach to Moving Image that embeds the process within the work – the media itself becoming a near-character in the linear, and non-linear narratives. The screening includes a range of works made between 2000 and the present, and charts a significant period of change in our relationship with visual culture, and the society that shapes it. Torsten Lauschmann
Let’s Kiosk
2000, 7 min 24 sec StevenClaydon
Bestiary
2009, 19 min 22 sec Clunie Reid
Wen u travel u go 2 sleep
2011, 5 min 55 sec StephenSutcliffe
Please, please, please…
2001, 2 min 3 sec HannahSawtell
You’ll Never Walk Alone
2006/7, 7 min
You’ll Never Walk Alone forces together three forms of dissemination; a series of slide format images appropriated from a campaign for a life insurance group, an ‘Acid’ recording from the same period and a contemporary computer slideshow programme of a turning cube. Hovering between satire, horror, belligerence and social entropy, the video displays anaesthetic of prescribed resistance. RachaelReupke
Deportment
2011, 3 min 32 sec HannahSawtell
Entroludes 4: Means
2010, 4 min
Part 4 ofEntroludes 1-6.
Means utilizes stills, sound and moving image retrieved from the internet; whatSawtell refers to as ‘the detritus of the contemporary arcade’. Sound fragments are edited purposefully leaving the audio glitches to reveal the cut and paste nature of digital work. Made specifically for the context of the cinema; pushing a private/ low resolution reception into a place of group/ high definition reception. The video explores the disjuncture between manual labour and digital economy. StephenSutcliffe
Come to the Edge
2003, 1 min 49 sec Come to the Edge uses a recording of the poet Christopher Logue reciting a poem originally written in 1968. The poem is combined with video footage shot in a 6th form common room. In the footage a good-humoured scene is suddenly transformed into something altogether more sinister as the group of schoolboys enact a ritual humiliation upon a seemingly older, mustachioed boy.