FLAMIN Productions Round 1
The five London-based artists selected for FLAMIN Productions Round 1 were: Phil Coy, Charlotte Ginsborg, Anja Kirschner and David Panos, Elizabeth Price and Ben Rivers.
About the Projects
Facade
Phil Coy
Credit: Facade, Phil Coy (2010)
Façade re-transmits some of the flawed utopias and polarised theories suggested by Sergei Eisenstein's unmade film 'The Glass House' into a fantastical vision of contemporary glass architecture far removed from its egalitarian origins. Shot in a green screen television studio the action takes place in the non-spaces it describes conflating archive footage of plate glass manufacture with architectural 'walkthroughs' of never-to-be-built glass buildings. Narrated by TV news anchor Julia Somerville Façade casts 'glass' as a transparent subject rendered slowly opaque by the language it engenders.
Working with a production film crew and architectural visualisation specialists Miller Hare, Façade's production process implements the tools and hierarchical systems associated with corporate media production in order to reveal the constituent parts of that system.
Phil Coy is an artist working across a range of media, collaging concepts rooted in the radical art and literature of the 20th century, with languages and architectures of contemporary global commerce.
In 2000, he began making work exploring the intersection between digital and analogue modes of production, with an emphasis on landscape representation. In large scale land works such A walk in the park (2000), Red Square (2004) and Black spot (2005) he mixed techniques of digital imaging, minimalist painting and land art to produce a proto-augmented reality. He frequently works with specific communities, architects, software developers, musicians and scientists to produce digital films, generative performances, and public works.
Melior Street
Charlotte Ginsborg
Credit: Melior Street, Charlotte Ginsborg (2011)
Melior Street near London Bridge, a road with a diverse demographic and a confused architecture, functions as a stage set for an exploration of eight peoples' relationship to community and transience within the city. Ostensibly a series of documentary portraits, the cast of real people who are all connected to the street, are not only the subject of the film but are major contributors to its content. The film investigates the power of the author's voice within documentary as orchestrated actions, staged conversations and songs (created in collaboration with the composer Gabriel Prokofiev), puncture the sense of a recorded reality.
Charlotte Ginsborg is a London based film director. Coming from a background in fine art and photography her films combine documentary, fiction and performance to create rich multi-layered portraits of diverse communities and engaging individuals. Working with dance, spoken word and song the films interrogate the complexity of contemporary cities, politically, socially and aesthetically. Recently she has worked in observational documentary to create The Taste & Ache of Action, a film that combines boxing & dancing, and The Trojans, a film following a group of Syrian Refugees living in Glasgow as they develop and perform a play at the Edinburgh Festival that combines their experiences of loss and exile with Euripides Greek tragedy, The Trojan Women.
https://www.charlotteginsborg.com/
The Empty Plan
Anja Kirschner and David Panos
Credit: The Empty Plan, Anja Kirschner and David Panos (2010)
'The Empty Plan' examines the political and aesthetic dimensions of the work of Bertolt Brecht and the relationship between theory and practice, art and revolution.
Reconstructing four productions of his play, Die Mutter, from Weimar Germany to the GDR, and contrasting these with scenes from Brecht's exile in Los Angeles during the 1940s, the film traces the changing context for his work, as theatre is superseded by cinema and the revolutionary movements that informed Brecht are destroyed and betrayed.
The film deploys improvisation, documentary and cinematic modes and was shot in Los Angeles and in historic theatre locations in London and Southend.
Made in collaboration from 2006-2013, Anja Kirschner and David Panos’ long-form films and installations collide popular culture references, historical research and literary tropes. They often involve amateurs, actors and specialists from other disciplines in the creation of speculative histories and spectacular fantasies that and interrogate social reality and the relation of art to class power.
Kirschner and Panos were the winners of the Jarman Award 2011 and their works have been widely exhibited and screened internationally, including Tate Modern, Tate Britain, ICA, Chisenhale Gallery, Secession, Palais de Tokyo, Artists Space, Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, Kunsthall Oslo, CCA, Glasgow as well as the British Art Show 7, the 2012 Liverpool Biennial and the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen.
https://lux.org.uk/artist/anjadavidkirschnerpanos
West Hinder
Elisabeth Price
Credit: West Hinder, Elizabeth Price (2012)
In December 2002 a ship called the Tricolor sank in dense fog along with a cargo of 2897 luxury cars.
It went down in an area of the Channel between the British Isles and mainland Europe, called West Hinder. The video takes us to this location, to the dark hold of the wrecked vessel, to witness the spectral image of its luxury cargo drifting in the murk.
West Hinder is a small area of the sea unclaimed and unlegislated by any state, and within the video it operates as an 'other' place, with different laws much like Space is used in Science Fiction. This provides the premise for a fantasy narrative in which the luxury cars exert a kind of consciousness. The morphology of their intelligent vehicle control systems (that digitally deliver navigation, entertainment, climate and safety functions) is corrupted by their immersion in the environment of West Hinder. They develop memory, desire and the language to express these things. Most particularly they acquire a powerful collective will, and the ability to exert their force in concert.
The combined force of these 'intelligent control systems' constitutes the video's sole protagonist. It narrates, addressing the viewer via on screen motion graphics and synthetic voice; it provides mapping graphics to narrate the events of the wreck, and it selects the musical soundtrack for the action. In the latter stages of the video, the narration shifts into a more lyric form. The cars 'play' a song from their hard-drives, and their drifting inertia evolves into a lovely, synchronized underwater dance.
Elizabeth Price (born 6 November 1966) is a British artist who won the Turner Prize in 2012. She is a former member of indie pop bands Talulah Gosh and The Carousel.
https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/elizabeth-price-17387
Two Years at Sea
Ben Rivers
Credit: Two Years at Sea, Ben Rivers (2011)
A man called Jake lives in the middle of the forest. He goes for walks in whatever the weather, and takes naps in the misty fields and woods. He builds a raft to spend time sitting in a loch. Drives a beat-up jeep to pick up wood supplies. He is seen in all seasons, surviving frugally, passing the time with strange projects, living the radical dream he had as a younger man, a dream he spent two years working at sea to realise
Two Years At Sea was released in selected cinemas across the UK by Soda Pictures.
Ben Rivers studied Fine Art at Falmouth School of Art, initially in sculpture before moving into photography and super8 film. After his degree he taught himself 16mm filmmaking and hand-processing. His practice as a filmmaker treads a line between documentary and fiction. Often following and filming people who have in some way separated themselves from society, the raw film footage provides Rivers with a starting point for creating oblique narratives imagining alternative existences in marginal worlds.