Artprojx at Greenland Street presents:

Alice Anderson

David Austen

David Blandy

Ravi Deepres

Terry Smith

Georgina Starr

ZATORSKI & ZATORSKI

4 July – 22 July 2007

Wed 4 July at 7pm
Terry Smith – Broken Voices with live music

Linda Hirst singing and Ian Dearden sound

Thurs 5 July at 7pm
David Austen - CRACKERS

in conversation with Michael Stanley, Director Milton Keynes Gallery

Sat 7 July at 7pm

Georgina Starr's THEDA

with live improvised music by Frakture 6

Weds 18 July at 7pm
Ravi Deepres

in conversation with David Gryn, Artprojx

Thurs 19 July at 7pm

David Blandy

with live performance and discussion

Sat 21 July at 7pm
Zatorski & Zatorski

in conversation with Jennifer Thatcher, Director of Talks at the ICA, London

Sun 22 July at 7pm
Alice Anderson

in conversation with Ian White, film curator for Whitechapel Art Gallery

Greenland Street. Liverpool L1 0BY
www.afoundation.org.uk

For each event the artists will be present to talk about their work and talk with the audience.

Each event is free but booking is recommended.
Please contact info@afoundation.org.uk
or call 0151 706 0600 to reserve a seat.

Project curated by David Gryn

Contact/info/press events@artprojx.com

+44(0)7711 127 848

Artprojx Media Partner:

A free programme of films by contemporary artists featuring film screenings, live music, live performances, talks and audience Q & A.

Alice Anderson
Sunday 22 July, 7pm
Alice Anderson introduces four of her short films.
Fuelled by introspective visions of childhood Anderson’s
works are often described as ‘little Freudian tales’ each work
contributing to a kind of novel that the artist has been building
since 1999.

Alice Anderson will be in converstation with Ian White,

curator, writer and Adjunct Film Curator for the

Whitechapel Gallery, London.

David Austen
Thursday 5 July, 7pm
David Austen introduces his witty and
poignant film Smoking Moon and the
dark and disturbing drama Crackers,
a high definition film with sound
commissioned in 2007 by Milton Keynes Gallery.

David Austen and Michael Stanley,

Director of Milton Keynes Gallery will be in converstaion

David Blandy
Thursday 19 July, 7pm
A search for soul and identity through popular music,
Bruce Lee and Star Wars, David Blandy’s films use
humour to question the individual within mass
media constructions.
With a live performance by the artist.

David Blandy will be in conversation after his

performance and screening

Ravi Deepres
Wednesday 18 July, 7pm
Filmmaker and photographer Ravi Deepres
often works with music and dance to create
dynamic films expressing intuitive energy.
Deepres will introduce four of his films including
Tremor a choreographed dance sequence shot
in a wind tunnel.

Ravi Deepres will be introduced and in

conversation with David Gryn, Director of Artprojx

Terry Smith
Wednesday 4 July, 7pm
Taking a piece of music by Monteverdi
as its starting point Broken Voices Part 2
is a collaboration between international
vocalist Linda Hirst and composer Ian Dearden
that is part live performance and part sound
and video installation.

Georgina Starr

Saturday 7 July, 7pm
Georgina Starr revisits the lost films of 1920’s
screen legend Theda Bara in her silent film
performance THEDA.

With live improvised accompaniment from
Liverpool improvisers Frakture 6.

ZATORSKI & ZATORSKI

Saturday 21 July, 7pm
ZATORSKI & ZATORSKI question and subvert our
expectations through works that can often be seen
as video paintings. The artists will introduce a selection
of sumptuous video works that explore ideas around
mortality, including Kokoro, a surreal micro-drama
played out by two butterflies in the arena of a female
belly button.
 

ZATORSKI & ZATORSKI will be in conversation with

Jennifer Thatcher, curator, writer and director of talks at ICA

Each event is free but booking is recommended

Each event will be introduced briefly by David Gryn, Artprojx

PRESS RELEASE

BRIEF ARTIST AND FILM DETAILS:

Alice Anderson - films
The woman who saw herself disappear 9 mins
Prompt Book 16 mins
The idiot of Evenville 10 mins
Selection of short films from the journal 10 mins

David Austin - films
Smoking Moon, 2006, 13 mins, video, silent
Crackers, 2007, 38 mins, HD video with sound

David Blandy - films & performance

Live Performance:

"The White and Black Minstrel Show presents: The Revolution will not be Televised" 5 mins
Screening:
"Preview for The Fortress of Solitude" 5 mins
"i am" 2 mins
"emotional content" 2 mins
"what is soul" 3 mins
"The Way of the Barefoot Lone Pilgrim: Soul of the Lakes" 25 mins

Ravi Deepres - films
Tremor
A Tale Of
Runner
22

Georgina Starr - screening with live improvised music by Frakture
Theda, 2006, 40 mins

Terry Smith – live music and screening
Broken Voices part 2, premiere
a collaboration between composer Ian Dearden and singer Linda Hirst

Zatorski & Zatorski - films
Kokoro, 2005, 22 mins
Cordero, 2006, 9 mins
The Feast of St Cuthbert, 2007

MORE INFORMATION:

Alice Anderson
The woman who saw herself disappear
A ghost woman remembers her childhood. She recollects the day she has been banished by her mother for having committed a mysterious crime.

The idea of reminiscences plays a big part in Alice’s work. Here, her inspiration is drawn from one of Virginia Woolf’s books, To the Lighthouse, 1927, a novel in which she evokes her childhood, and in which everything happens in the characters’ minds. They are invited “to come and go like ghosts.”

“The Woman Who Saw herself Disappear” is a tale somewhat like those by Angela Carter: it is a fairy tale without fairies, without hope, without a moral, without princesses or princes charming.

Prompt Book
Prompt Book is a drama that fails to offer the statutory happy end.
A very long time ago in a remote province was the great contest for the best somersault. Natasha was practicing day and night to keep her promise to her father that she would win the gold medal for the most beautiful jump. She would give him the prize money, so he could pay off his debts once and for all. Natasha would have done absolutely anything for her father.

The idiot of Evenville
The tale shows the story of a 12 year old girl that everybody called “the idiot”.

Selection of short films from the journal, 2005-6, 10 mins

David Austin
Smoking Moon
a black and white film, is an illusion and a self portrait as well as a recording of a performance. Like a creature from the ocean depths, an ancient crescent moon hangs in a black void smoking a cigarette. This charming and witty film is also desperately sad and affecting.

Crackers
Through the provocative and sometimes explicit nature of the language, the film resonates with many ideas that often resurface in Austen's work - love, sex, death and the ache of human impulse.

David Blandy

Live Performance:

"The White and Black Minstrel Show presents: The Revolution will not be Televised" 5 mins
Using the character of the White and Black Minstrel (an inverted Black and White Minstrel) Blandy performs “live” lip-syncing to songs like “I’m Black and I’m Proud” and “Is it because I’m black?”. This clownish figure, with a “whited-up” face, has come to embody Blandy's cultural confusion in this post-colonial world. For this performance, he will do a powerpoint presentation of the Gil Scott-Heron classic, "The Revolution will not be Televised"

"Preview for The Fortress of Solitude" 5 mins
This film is a 5 minute preview for a film that doesn't exist, or is the film itself, depending on how you want to look at it. The preview advertises the forthcoming "Fortress of Solitude" starring "The Man from Elsewhere", a new character that embodies Blandy's existential alienation. The Man from Elsewhere is at once a reference to David Bowie's character in Roeg's film "The Man who Fell to Earth", and at the same time simply Blandy in a suit, wearing a "detective's hat"- he is trying to investigate the mystery of reality. Incorporating elements from manga and hollywood films, notably "The Little Norse Prince" and "Superman", "The Fortress of Solitude" hints at a hermit-like existence in a Waldenesque hut peppered by strange visions of death and destruction, a meditation on mortality as seen through popular culture. The "Hut" sequence was shot on location at Skansen, an outdoor cultural museum in Stockholm, where buildings have been gathered from the whole of Sweden to "represent" different lifestyle and times. The hut is out of place and out of time, like The Man from Elsewhere.

"i am" 2 mins
In "i am", oedipal conflict is replayed through Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back. Blandy and his father take on the roles of the heroic Luke Skywalker and sinister Darth Vader, in the iconic scene where Vader reveals that he is Luke's father. However the scene is played out in John Blandy's kitchen, scene of many of David's teenage tantrums, all the positions of the shots echoing the shots from the original film. "There is no escape..."

"emotional content" 2 mins
Bruce Lee teaches David Blandy a lesson in his back garden.

"what is soul" 3 mins
As Ben E. King asks, "what is soul, babe?", Blandy tries to find out, by singing along. However all you hear is King's booming voice, and the incongruously huge sound of the music, as though it is recorded in a concert hall, contrasting with the intimate setting of Blandy's bedroom. In an impassioned performance, Blandy remains voiceless, a ventriloquist's dummy trying to gain a soul.

"The Way of the Barefoot Lone Pilgrim: Soul of the Lakes" 25 mins
In the Barefoot Lone Pilgrim video/performance pieces, Blandy integrates real life and virtual adventures. Donning the orange robes of a Buddhist Shaolin Monk, portable record player in hand, the Lone Pilgrim has been a hermit in an 18th Century park in Surrey, made an Amercan road trip, and searched for the places that had associations with soul songs in New York. In Soul of the Lakes, the Lone Pilgrim walked between the only two record shops in the Lake District in the north of England, searching for soul. Intercutting the footage of the real journey with segments from films such as Shogun Assassin and Princess Mononoke and television programmes Kung Fu and Monkey, the film of the performance weaves together an idiosyncratic tale of self-discovery which is all the more believable for its shifts into fantasy and personal reverie.

Ravi Deepres
Tremor
Tremor creates an intense fusing of sound, space and physical control.
Set in a wind tunnel, the film is sound driven where a dancer becomes physically charged by bass and raw frequency rhythms. As the sound increases the movement of the dancer intensifies until a frenetic state is reached where the body can no longer sustain itself and becomes uncontrollable.
Choreographed by Wayne MacGregor.

A Tale Of
“Set in an old, empty building which time has left untouched, this is a film with an intertwining and metaphysical narrative. Hypnotic and sudden choreography of movement, camera and sound blend seamlessly to create a raw, haunted and beautiful impression of multi dimensional worlds occupying the same spaces at fractured intervals. An expression of instinctive energy moving through time and space. “
Ravi Deepres

“Something came, and something left
What departed was a breath
Only a breath...”
Saburo Teshigawara

Runner
'Runner' takes its audience as close as possible to the mental and physical experience of running a marathon through sound and the moving image. Using material from the largest half marathon in the world, The Great North Run in England, and combining this with specially shot sequences of a single runner, it follows the journey of a man, one soul in the flood of 50,000.

Runner combines deliberately contrasted raw documentary style video and beautiful 16mm film, together with an original sound composition by Zoviet France. 5.1 surround sound.

22
Experimental choreographic film piece where a single camera movement reveals a non dialogue narrative through time, and choreographic expression.
Made in collaboration with Michael Baig Clifford, Rosie Kay and writer Jim Crace

Terry Smith
Broken Voices/Lost in Space
Broken Voices is a sound and video installation, which incorporates a live
element. It takes Duo Seraphim Clambant for 3 voices, a piece of music by
Monteverdi as a starting point, or put more simply a ready made. The project is divided into four movements, which echo the four elements in the music, three voices and one instrumental accompaniment.

The work is a collaboration between Ian Dearden and Linda Hirst, both will perform the new broken score and improvised version of the work. and will also include the all girls Gospel Choir from Saint Saviours and Saint Olav's School.

Georgina Starr
Theda
The work examines the vicarious nature of the cinematic experience and explores the silent film form through image and live sound. Experimenting with performance styles and narrative techniques Starr considers the movie screen as a mirror and how we use film fiction to explore and escape our own identity.

As well as the art of Theda Bara, Starr draws from many of the masters of the silent era; from the great early film-makers Louis Feuillade and Carl Th. Dreyer, to the German expressionist theatre of Max Reinhardt, and the theories and pre-1900 acting techniques of Francois Delsarte. She also looks to the lost or neglected talent of other actresses such as Alla Nazimova, Barbara La Marr, Marguerite Clark, Musidora, Maud Allen and many more.

Zatorski and Zatorski
The Last 3600 Seconds of Wasp
It is not often that we have the opportunity to witness the last hour of a creature’s life: in The Last 3600 Seconds of Wasp we share in a wasp’s final moments as he holds with every gasp of breath onto life. Though futile, his struggle to cling to life is passionate, tragic and universal. The wasp’s swansong is carefully choreographed to an emotive Philip Glass soundtrack which ultimately (melo-) dramatizes the demise of this small creature and infuses the work with a surrealist celebration of the absurd.

Kokoro
The butterfly is symbolic of the soul or spirit and with its metamorphosis, the passage from life to death and resurrection. In their film Kokoro, ZATORSKI & ZATORSKI present us with a surreal micro-drama played out by two butterflies around the arena of a female belly button. ZATORSKI & ZATORSKI touch on the complex nuances of violence. We are left constantly guessing as to the relationship of the protagonists – are they lovers or rivals? Or are we witnessing the cruel and sadistic games of a psychopath? With their re-appropriation of a melodramatic, scale swelling, Bernard Herrmann score (Vertigo), ZATORSKI & ZATORSKI ultimately question and subvert our expectations, drawing on our Hitchcock-ian cinematic associations. The beautiful visuals, which move from being realistic to a sumptuous, painterly, hyper-reality by the end of the piece, add to the dream-like and surrealist quality of the drama.

Cordero
Referencing the paintings of Zurbaran, Cordero is one of a series of sublimely beautiful “video paintings” completed whilst ZATORSKI + ZATORSKI were artists in residence at Durham Cathedral (2005-2006). A bound lamb lies on a stone slab, its soft fleece and serene face bathed in dramatic chiaroscuro lighting. The static abdomen and the ring of crimson decorating the lamb’s nostril point to the absence of life. The time-based nature of video is deftly employed to capture the utter stillness of death. Cordero explores the limbo of that space between this world and the other.

The Feast of St Cuthbert
A Vanitas video painting, The Feast of St Cuthbert is from a series of works entitled Contemplations of Mortality. On an oval platter, a human skull, nestled on an alp of its own bones, stares straight at us with a sardonic wry grin twinkling with gold fillings, as 13 beautiful fat canaries and lithe finches peck and scrape at the pile with the zeal of rapacious vultures. Slowly the heaped human is explored with beak and claw, there is no sound save for the sinister scratchings and squawks of the birds and the rattle of clattering bones.

ARTIST NOTES:
ALICE ANDERSON
Born 11 November 1976 in London, raised in the South of France. Lives in London since 2002. Freudian Tales: Alice Anderson has been developing an extremely mature body of work since 1999. Delving into the various levels of a possible autobiography intertwining the imaginary and the fictive. She has an amazing way of telling stories, creating intense dream-like atmospheres with smooth and perfect images serving as a screen for the blackness and violence of the familial situations she speaks of. Her characters act like automatons: Lost in a labyrinthic and Kafkaesque administration at closing time (N.I.H.R., 2002). Hypnotized poisoning milk (The Idiot of Evenville, 2004), a mother suggesting her daughter to jump out of the window (Prompt Book, 2005) a mother banishing her daughter forever.. (The Woman Who Saw Herself Disappear 2006)

DAVID AUSTEN
Austen was born in Harlow in 1960 and studied both at Maidstone College of Art and the Royal College London. His work is represented in many important collections including Tate, The British Council, Arts Council and the Government Art Collection, and in private collections as far reaching as Madrid and Alabama, Edinburgh and Sydney, Brussels, Los Angeles, Tokyo and New York. He has received major commissions in the City of London and in Cairo and has curated a number of exhibitions and publications including 'Exodus' at Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge in 2004. In 2007 he has had a major solo exhibition at Milton Keynes Gallery.

DAVID BLANDY

David Blandy lives and works in London, using video, performance and comics to address how identity is constructed. A recipient of an Artsadmin Artists’ Bursary, Blandy has exhibited widely both in the UK and abroad at venues such as at Gasworks, London; FACT, Liverpool; PS1 Gallery, New York; the Centre d'art Contemporain, Geneva and participated in KölnShow2, Cologne. Blandy has had solo shows both at Cell Project Space in London early in 2007 as part of Jerwood Artist Platform, and at Platform China Project Space, Beijing, which was curated by David Thorp. Blandy will be resident at Cornerhouse, Manchester, as part of ArtRadio throughout August.

RAVI DEEPRES
Ravi Deepres, who was born in 1970 Liverpool of English/Asian parentage and brought up in the North East of England. Deepres, who has over recent years established an international reputation for his photographic and video work. His collaborations with Japanese choreographer Saburo Teshigawara and Royal Ballet artistic director Wayne MacGregor have been seen at opera houses, theatres and festivals around the world. His photographic works have been exhibited in group shows across the UK including the Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, and recent shows at Cornerhouse. Manchester..

TERRY SMITH
Born 1956, London. He lives and works in London. Smith is an important British artist, one, like Amikam Toren, who, perhaps because of his age, his conceptual and intellectual rigour and his often ephemeral working practice, has often been ignored - to their shame - both by the art establishment and the critical community.

GEORGINA STARR
Georgina Starr, born 1968 in Leeds. Starr has been making large-scale video and film installations for the past 14 years. Her subjects are extraordinarily varied and her diverse body of work has incorporated video, film, animation, photography, music, writing and performance. Some of the key themes of Starr's work - from Hypnodreamdruff (1996) a 6 screen multimedia work about the intertwining lives of a group of lonely eccentric characters, to Big V (2004) a four screen piece about teenage sexuality and Catholicism - explore the relationship between history and memory; attempting to extract meaning from collapsing realities, she makes complex and obsessive investigations into invisible, lost or fragile phenomena.  Her works have been exhibited at Museum of Modern Art, New York; Venice Biennale; Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles and Kunsthalle Wien. Solo exhibitions include Tate Gallery, London; Ikon Gallery, Birmingham; Kunsthalle Zurich and the Stedelijk Museum Bureau, Amsterdam.

ZATORSKI & ZATORSKI
ZATORSKI & ZATORSKI are based in London. They have exhibited their work in numerous international institutions including the Gallery Espai Ubu, Barcelona; The Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art, Israel; The Whitechapel Art Gallery, London; The Arts Centre, St Petersburg, USA and The Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon. They also have a number of forthcoming shows across Europe including Defining the Contemporary at The Whitechapel Art Gallery, with auction at Sotheby’s in London and Wanderland at the Museum Haus Lange in Germany.