Award Extends Shortlist To Ten Artists, Offering A Broader Survey Of Artist Film And Video Work

Film London and Channel 4 in association with the Whitechapel Gallery are delighted to announce Ed Atkins, Claire Hooper, Anja Kirschner & David Panos, Torsten Lauschmann, Elizabeth Price, Laure Prouvost, Hilary Koob-Sassen, Clio Barnard, Corin Sworn and Imogen Stidworthy as the shortlisted artists for this year's prestigious Film London Jarman Award. The winner will be announced at a special event on 3 October 2011 at the Whitechapel Gallery.

For the first year the 2011 shortlist, selected from a longer list of artists nominated by experts across the contemporary arts sector, has been extended to present the work of 10 artists working with film and video, in order to offer a more comprehensive survey of the work and practice of UK film and video artists, and celebrate the rich and eclectic array of work emerging in recent years.

This year's Jarman Award jury members are: Stuart Comer Film Curator, Tate Modern (Chair); Iwona Blazwick, Director, Whitechapel Gallery; Michael Bracewell, Novelist and Cultural Historian; Sandra Hebron, Artistic Director, BFI London Film Festival; Tabitha Jackson, Commissioning Editor, Arts, Channel 4 and Mark Rappolt, Editor, ArtReview.

Launched in 2008, the Film London Jarman Award gives recognition and support to artists working with the moving image and whose work resists conventional definition, encompassing innovation and excellence. The Award is inspired by visionary avant-garde film-maker Derek Jarman, one of the most esteemed and controversial artists of the late 20^th Century.

A UK touring programme showcasing works by the shortlisted artists will take place over the coming weeks at venues throughout the UK, including CIRCA Screen (Sunderland), CCA (Glasgow), FACT (Liverpool) and Picture This (Bristol). The tour will culminate in a day of screenings and events at London's Whitechapel Gallery on Saturday 1 October. Full details of the touring programme and further dates, will be announced shortly.

Adrian Wootton, Chief Executive of Film London said: "With the expanded shortlist this year, the Jarman Award 2011 is a fantastic showcase of the extraordinary artist film-making talent we have in the UK. The 10 shortlisted artists demonstrate a great depth and breadth of work produced in this arena. This award is all about championing that work and promoting these brilliant artists. By extending the shortlist from 4 to 10 we are giving more artists this important platform. It is wonderful, for both the sector and for Film London, that we can continue this support for artist film-makers thanks to funding from Arts Council England, support from our partners Channel 4 and the Whitechapel Gallery plus of course the backing of the Jarman Estate."

Following in the footsteps of previous winners Luke Fowler (2008), Lindsay Seers (2009), and Emily Wardill (2010), the winner of the 2011 Film London Jarman Award will be awarded a £10,000 cash prize and a unique broadcast commission, with a budget of £20,000, to make a film-based artwork for Channel 4's new art strand which will be launched later this year. This is the only Award of its kind where an artist is rewarded with both financial assistance to enable them to flourish and the exceptional opportunity to broadcast their work on primetime national television.

Editor's Notes:

The 2011 Film London Jarman Award winner will be announced at an event on Monday 3 October at the Whitechapel Gallery.

The shortlisted artists will be presenting their work at various venues across the UK in advance of the Award night at the following venues, with more screenings to be announced:

• CIRCA Screen, Sunderland (www.ccaprojects.org.uk): Tuesday 13, Tuesday 27 September
• FACT, Liverpool (www.fact.co.uk): Wednesday 14 September
• CCA, Glasgow (www.cca-glasgow.com/home): Thursday 15 September
• Duke of York's Picturehouse, Brighton (www.picturehouses.co.uk/cinema/Duke_Of_Yorks): Sunday 25 and Tuesday 27 September
• Hyde Park Picture House, Leeds (www.hydeparkpicturehouse.co.uk): Wednesday 28 and Thursday 29 September
• Picture This, Bristol (www.picture-this.org.uk): Thursday 29 September

For further press information, please contact:

John Dunning or Emma Pettit at Margaret_ on john@margaretlondon.com / emma@margaretlondon.com / 020 7033 6868

Colette Geraghty at Film London on colette.geraghty@filmlondon.org.uk / 020 7613 7680

2011 Shortlisted Artist Biographies:

Ed Atkins

Ed Atkins works predominantly in HD video, drawing and writing. Much of his work might be understood as attempting to conceive of a kind of materialism founded on perverse assertions and immaterial acts of conjuring; a peculiar site where ghosts might weigh several billion tons and bleed tar; a chord played on a Roland System-100 might be legitimately used to diminish the size of a malignant tumour. Clinically proven. Materialisation and embodiment. Atkins lives and works in London and holds an MA Fine Art from Slade School of Fine Art. His recent work has been shown at ICA, Whitechapel Gallery, Cabinet Gallery and international venues.

Clio Barnard

Clio Barnard is a film-maker whose work has shown in cinemas, international film festivals and screened in galleries including Tate Modern, London and MoMA, New York. Her work has been screened on Channel 4 and had several international broadcasts. She is currently developing her second feature film, with FilmFour and funding awarded by the UK Film Council. Her critically acclaimed debut feature, The Arbor (2010) has won several awards including Best New Documentary Film-maker at Tribeca Film Festival New York, Best Newcomer and Sutherland Awards at 54^th BFI London Film Festival.

Claire Hooper

Claire Hooper's recent work has been concerned with Greek mythology, in particular the way in which Hesiod's Theogony gives an anthropomorphic familial relation to matter and experience. Her practice touches on perception and experience in narrative, and how one immerses oneself in reading or watching, and in particular she has been interested in descriptions of interior spaces and how this relates to the interiority of fantasy. Hooper has shown widely in Europe and abroad including recent and forthcoming shows at Lothringer 13, Munich; MUMOK, Vienna; Sketch, London; IT Park Taipei; Kunstwerke, Berlin, and various Serpentine gallery events. She is represented by Hollybush Gardens London and her work is distributed by Lux. She was the 2010 winner of the Baloise Art Prize at Statements, Art Basel.

Torsten  Lauschmann

Torsten Lauschmann's diverse practice continually shifts and plays with expectations of images and the interpretation of meaning. He is concerned with both the aesthetic content of images and the 'decoding' of meaning and narrative. Lauschmann also focuses on the mechanics with which meaning is created, by counter-intuitive and wayward, but always humane, manipulation of technology. Lauschmann's eclectic, idiosyncratic and multifarious practice is not led by the desire to produce formal coherency, but by the artist's interconnected interests in the science, the personal and the absurd. Since moving to Glasgow in 1993 to study Fine Art Photography at Glasgow School of Art Lauschmann has been exhibiting, screening and performing his work throughout the UK and internationally.

Anja Kirschner and David Panos

Anja Kirschner and David Panos' collaborative films collide popular culture references, historical research and literary tropes and re-imagine the past in order to interrogate the future. Their recent work has increasingly revolved around the nature of performance and narrative construction and their role in the formation of subjectivity and political agency. They live and work in London. Recent solo exhibitions include Staatsgalerie Stuttgart (2011), Kunsthall Oslo (2011), Focal Point Gallery, Southend-on-Sea (2010), Chisenhale Gallery, London (2009), Centre for Contemporary Arts, Glasgow (2009); Badischer Kunstverein, Karlsruhe (2009) and Transmission Gallery, Glasgow (2008); recent group shows include British Art Show 7, Nottingham, London, Glasgow, Plymouth (2010/2011), There Is No Alternative, Konsthall C, Stockholm (2010), Depression, Marres, Maastricht (2009); Everything Then Passes Beween Us, Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne (2009) and Nought to Sixty, Institute of Contemporary Arts, London (2008).

Elizabeth Price

Elizabeth Price is an artist based in London. She makes narrative videos that incorporate live action, motion graphics and sound. These videos are concerned with the material culture of our recent past - how it remains in our collective cultural imagination, and resides in our collective cultural unconscious.

In the last year she has exhibited User Group Disco as part of the British Art Show; and was the Arts Council England Helen Chadwick Fellow at the University of Oxford and British School in Rome. In 2010 she was commissioned to make The Tent by the Frieze Foundation and Channel 4 for Frieze Projects 2010.

Laure Prouvost

Laure Prouvost lives and works in London. Her video installations challenge the nature of the filmic medium by rendering the exhibition space part of the narrative, with the audience subsequently becoming an implicit part of the work.

Recent solo exhibitions include before, before. before it was, the title sequence, spinning before next, a squid, at MOTINTERNATIONAL, London, April, 2011; Art Now Lightbox: Laure Provost: It, heat, hit at Tate Britain, London, 2010; All These Things Think Link, Flat Time House, London, 2010; Frieze Frame, Frieze Art Fair, London, 2010; Present Future, Artissima Art Fair, Turin, 2010; Storeybored, After the Butcher, Berlin, 2009; Burrow Me, Lighthouse, Brighton, 2009.

Recent screenings include The Ann Arbor Film Festival, Michigan, USA, 57th Oberhausen Film Festival, Germany and Videozone 5, Tel Aviv Biennial, Israel). In 2011 she was nominated for the MaxMara Art Prize for Women and was principle prizewinner at the 57th Oberhausen film festival.

Hilary Koob-Sassen

Working with and across text, song, sculpture, film, animation and performance, Hilary Koob-Sassen creates systems in which these diverse approaches work together to reflect and address the current bio-economic situation through which we are formed as social, physical and political subjects.

Hilary Koob-Sassen's work has been exhibited widely at film festivals and galleries internationally, including: Athens Biennial (2009); Transmediale Festival, Berlin (2009); European Media Art Festival (EMAF), Osnabruecken (2006); Beijing Film Academy (2009); Sketch Gallery, London (2009); Serpentine Gallery, London (2008); and BFI Southbank and South London Gallery, London (2007). His recent project Faith In Infrastructure took form as a manifesto, six sculptures, six songs, a variety of performances and a 30 minute film, which together populated and navigated a model of biological life in time.

Imogen Stidworthy

Imogen Stidworthy makes videos, sound works and installations that examine aspects of spoken language such as the sound of the voice, losing, gaining and regaining language, and acts or processes of translation. For Stidworthy, the voice is a social as much as an individual space. She uses it as material to question how we produce and locate ourselves in the social landscape.

Stidworthy has shown widely in major exhibitions including Documenta 12 (2007). In 2010/11 solo exhibitions have included: (.) at Matts Gallery, London; The Work, at Kunstpavillon Innsbruck; Imogen Stidworthy, at Arnolfini Bristol, and Barrabackslarrabang, at Galerie Akinci Amsterdam. She is based in Liverpool and is an Advising Researcher at the Jan van Eyck Academy, Maastricht.

Corin Sworn

Corin Sworn is interested in the means by which artefacts are borrowed, adapted and reconfigured to tell various stories. Her work often explores the alternate narratives that cultural products might develop through use.  Sworn is interested in hierarchies of attention, the systems that order these and how the erratic nature of subjective perception might undermine them. Solo exhibitions including: Art Now at Tate Britain, Tramway and Washington Garcia for Glasgow International. Group exhibitions include: Hors Pistes, Centre Pompidou, (2011) Morality, Witte de With (2010) EASTInternatinal(2009), Kunsthalle Basel(2009), Participant Inc. New York (2008). She is represented by Blanket Contemporary Inc and Kendall Koppe Gallery.

About the Film London Jarman Award:

In 2008 Film London and Channel 4 launched the Film London Jarman Award, an annual prize inspired by acclaimed artist film-maker, Derek Jarman. The award offers a UK artist film-maker a cash prize of £10,000 plus a broadcast commission from Channel 4 worth £20,000. The Jarman Award has been presented in association with the Whitechapel Gallery since 2009.

The winner for the 2008 inaugural year, presented in partnership with the Serpentine Gallery, was artist Luke Fowler. Fowler's Channel 4 artworks (commissioned under the 3 Minute Wonder banner) Anna, Helen, David and Lester premiered on C4 in April 2008 over 4 nights achieving audiences of up to 921,000 people per night. Luke Fowler enjoyed his first solo show in 2009 at London's Serpentine Gallery (May-June 09). 2009'S winner Lindsay Seers commissioned fims were transmitted in September 2012, and featured in her major new show 'It Has to Be This Way^2' at the Baltic, Newcastle in early 2011. In 2010, Emily Wardill received the Jarman Award. She is currently making a feature film, funded by Film London Artists' Moving Image Network.

www.filmlondon.org.uk/jarmanaward

About Film London Artists' Moving Image Network (FLAMIN):

Film London, with funding from Arts Council England (ACE), is a major supporter of artists' film-making, through the Film London Artists' Moving Image Network (FLAMIN). FLAMIN was launched by Film London in 2005 as a one-stop resource to provide London-based artists working in the moving image with access to funding, guidance and development opportunities. Through unique commissioning funds FLAMIN has commissioned over 100 productions, and supported the careers of countless other artists with programmes of one-to-one advice sessions, residencies and workshops.

FLAMIN Productions launched in 2009 commissioning longer form works which draw on the legacy of both fine art and film. The slate includes the debut feature from artist Ben River, Two Years At Sea, which has been selected to premiere at the 68^th Venice Film Festival in September.

www.filmlondon.org.uk/FLAMIN

Film London, as the capital's film and media agency, aims to ensure London has a thriving film sector that enriches the city's businesses and its people. The agency works with all the screen industries to sustain, promote and develop London as a major international production and film cultural capital, and it supports the development of the city's new and emerging film-making talent. Film London is funded by the Mayor of London, the National Lottery through the BFI, and receives significant support from Arts Council England and Skillset.

www.filmlondon.org.uk