See a diverse and thought-provoking programme of artists’ moving image and hear from one of the six shortlisted artists for this year’s Jarman Award: Sophia Al Maria, Cécile B. Evans, Shona Illingworth, Mikhail Karikis, Rachel Maclean and Heather Phillipson.
The shortlisted artists’ accomplishments for 2016 span single-screen works and immersive gallery installations, animation and intricate CGI techniques to ‘found footage’ sourced from YouTube. Their subjects range from memory and sound, future worlds and forgotten landscapes, the glitz of Gulf culture, pulsing beats of pop with dazzling montages of consumerism and the effect of new technology on human behaviour. Together, the artists selected for this year’s Jarman Award shortlist provide an important insight into the country’s very best moving image artists working now.
Inspired by visionary filmmaker Derek Jarman, the Jarman Award recognises and supports artists working with moving image and celebrates the spirit of experimentation, imagination and innovation in the work of artist filmmakers. The winner of the Jarman Award will be announced on 28 November 2016 at a special ceremony at the Whitechapel Gallery and receive a £10,000 prize. The Award is supported by Channel 4, who commissioned each of the shortlisted artists to produce a new film for their acclaimed Random Acts arts strand.
Want to know more about the Jarman Award? Visit their website.
Part I:
Mikhail Karikis, Children of Unquiet, 2014, 16 min
Heather Phillipson, FINAL DAYS, 2015, 22 min
Shona Illingworth, 216 Westbound, 2014, 17 min
Part II:
Cécile B. Evans, Hyperlinks or It Didn’t Happen, 2014, 22 min
Sophia Al Maria, The Watcher # 1, 2014, 6min and Choque, 2014, 5min
Rachel Maclean, Please Sir…, 2014, 25 min
About the Artists:
Sophia Al Maria’s work is an evocation of contemporary Arab culture and the glitz and hypocrisy of an oil rich Gulf with its shopping malls, marble interiors and sci-fi monoliths. Through a mixture of YouTube rips and home movie style footage Al Maria explores a hypermodern, globalised culture that brings with it a sense of ethical and environmental anxiety.
Cécile B. Evans’ interest in human emotions and generative digital processes are expressed in her uncanny animations. Highly stylised avatars and internet oddities speak with each other and to the viewer with simulated voices, including a representation of a well known actor and Agnes, a presence who lives on the Serpentine Gallery website.
Shona Illingworth’s elegiac films and installations often stem from her longstanding interest in emerging models of memory and from growing up in a dramatic and contested landscape. They combine imagery of striking landscapes with the experiences of people who went through life-changing events, which altered their relationship with the world around them.
Mikhail Karikis creates immersive installations born of a long-standing investigation of the voice as a sculptural material and a socio-political agent. Karikis’ projects are the result of an engagement with marginal landscapes and communities, from aging pearl divers in Korea to the marshland of the Isle of Grain in South East England via an uninhabited workers’ village in Italy and miners’ choirs of the Welsh valleys. His work is on show at the Whitstable Biennale this summer.
Through a car crash of images, colours, noise and language Heather Phillipson’s videos speak of the contemporary experience of consumption, production and overflow. Phillipson creates vast playful sculptures to house her video work, featuring plastic dogs on trampolines, wheelbarrows, and giant feet.
Rachel Maclean creates bizarre and nightmarish Alice in Wonderland worlds filmed in candy colours, where all the characters are played by the artist. Using clips of found sound – anything from TV talent contests to skin cream adverts and soap operas – Maclean’s film collages are grotesque and violent satires, both seductive and repulsive. Maclean will represent Scotland at the Venice Biennale in 2017.