This artist’s film screening curated by Magda Stawarska and Lubaina Himid, including works by Johanna Billing, Helen Cammock, Shaz Kerr, Magda Stawarska and Nicolas Villegas explores the role of sound and music in artist film. Programmed to coincide with the exhibition A Fine Toothed Comb.
Event/ This screening will be followed by an in conversation between Magda Stawarska, Shaz Kerr and Nicolas Villegas, chaired by Lubaina Himid.
Artists biogs:
Johanna Billing has been making video works since 1999 that weave together music, movement and rhythm. Merging the production modes of collective live events and workshops with a cinematic language, the films often focus on aspects of learning and how time plays a key role in that process. Billing in part directs the participants and in part activates a series of improvisations around the notion of performance and the possibility it holds to explore issues of the public and the private as well as the individual in the society as a whole.
Helen Cammock works in film, photography, print, text, song and performance to examine mainstream historical and contemporary narratives about Blackness, womanhood, oppression and resistance, wealth and power, poverty and vulnerability, throughout her practice. Her works often cut across time and geography, layering multiple voices as she investigates the cyclical nature of histories in her visual and aural assemblages. In 2017, Cammock won the Max Mara Art Prize for Women and in 2019 she was a joint recipient of The Turner Prize. She has exhibited and performed worldwide.
Shaz Kerr is an artist and designer. Her single channel works and installations have been shown at Tramway, Glasgow, London Film Festival, The Film Centre, Chicago, The New York Video Festival, UCLA Film & Video Archive, Los Angeles, BBC2, Channel 4, Scottish Television, Arte, France and ZDF, Germany. Her interiors have been featured in Condé Nast Traveller, British Vogue, The Times, Scotland on Sunday and The New York Times.
Magda Stawarska was born in Poland and lives and works in London and Preston. Her work is held in collections including the Arts Council England Collection, London. In 2021 Stawarska made significant contributions to the Lubaina Himid exhibition and catalogue at Tate Modern by creating five sonic environments within the architecture of the museum spaces. In 2022 she was commissioned by Van Abbe Museum in Eindhoven to compose an 8-channel sound installation in response to Lubaina Himid’s series of paintings titled Zanzibar(1998). This was part of Rewinding Internationalism, an exhibition and research project which travelled to Villa Arson, Nice, France (2022). Her recent solo shows include Spaces and Moments (2021) at Yamamoto Keiko Rochaix, London and a two venue solo project Close Up/Long Shot Polish Institute and Cross Cut Projectroom MAG3 Vienna, Austria (2019). In 2023 Stawarska will premiere a new multimedia presentation at the Sharjah Art Foundation.
Nicolás Villegas H. is originally from Colombia and is a graduate of the Polish National Film, Television and Theatre School in Lodz, Poland and Concordia University in Montreal, Canada. He works with most formats available to cinematography, ranging from Fisher-Price PXL cameras to 35mm, in traditional cinema, stop motion animation and video-art. He has collaborated with an international pool of directors and locations beyond his country’s borders. His experience encompasses fiction, documentary, art-based projects as well as videoclips and commercials. His films have been screened in numerous festivals and have won various prizes. He is currently an active member of the Colombian Society of Cinematographers (ADFC) and the Polish Society of Cinematographers (PSC). Although always developing, he has focussed his work on building images that enhance the story without over-riding it, working on camera work that attempts to be honest and emotional at the same time.