Film screening & Q+A: Daniel Ward – Lonesome Ghosts
Join us for a screening of Lonesome Ghosts (2025) by Oxford based artist Daniel Ward, a film exploring the ramifications of undercover policing in the UK, featuring Bonington Gallery exhibitor Alan Lodge.
Organised into four chapters, the work moves between filmed and found footage, official police documents, evidence and personal testimony, and offers an examination of the complex affinities between personal commitment, state violence and visual culture.
Each chapter centres a different voice or material: a meeting with an exhausted and lonely political organiser; silent footage of a funeral filmed by an undercover policing unit in 1979; an interview with a photographer who discovered he was the target of police surveillance; and a filmmaker grappling with the dreams and failures of collective filmmaking. Threaded throughout the work is a mutual consideration of politics and visual depiction. Ward focuses on the camera as a central device and, in turn, the purpose of both documents and documentary, as well as collective and group work.
Produced by Ward over a three year period using an iPhone and an inexpensive digital camera, the footage and its treatment is, at times, intentionally out of focus or underexposed: subjects are kept slightly out of shot, or at the edge of the frame, encased in shadows. Ward’s use of sound, from undefined field recordings to abstract audio samples, further emphasise the work’s interest in representation and depiction, contributing to the film’s underlying atmosphere of paranoia and fear.
The screening will feature written contributions from writers Hannah Proctor and Sam Dolbear. These are based upon spoken responses they gave as part of an event at Pelican House entitled Making Sense of Spycops, that included a screening a Lonesome Ghosts.
Lonesome Ghosts is 52 minutes long and will be followed by a Q+A with Daniel Ward & Alan Lodge, convened by Tom Godfrey (Bonington Gallery Curator & Director).
The gallery will remain open until 6.30pm to allow people to visit Alan’s exhibition prior to the event.
About Daniel Ward
Daniel Ward (Coventry, 1991) lives and works in Oxford. His work has been shown at HKW, Berlin, Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin, and the Museum for Photography, Berlin, amongst others. He was the inaugural recipient of the Michael O’Pray Prize in 2018, an award for new writing on moving-image art supported by Art Monthly and Film and Video Umbrella. He was commissioned by City Projects to write The Politics of Production, a report examining the conditions for producing experimental film in the UK, funded by Arts Council England and published in 2019. His writing has been published in Artforum, Art Monthly, Texte zur Kunst and New Left Review: Sidecar, amongst others. He is currently a PhD candidate at University College London, writing on 20th century British art, politics and film from 1982 to 1997.
www.danielward.live
About Sam Dolbear
Sam Dolbear is a writer, teacher, and researcher based in London. He has written books on the avant-garde radio producer Ernst Schoen (co-authored with Esther Leslie; Goldsmith Press, 2023) and the palm-reader and sexologist Charlotte Wolff (MA BIBLIOTHÈQUE, 2024). He’s an Associate Lecturer at Central Saint Martins and a Visiting Fellow at the Warburg Institute. He co-founded the audio-radio collective MayDay Radio, where he is collecting an archive on the London Lighthouse, a centre for people with HIV/AIDS opened in 1988.
www.samdolbear.net
About Hannah Proctor
Hannah Proctor teaches history at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow. She is the author or Burnout: The Emotional Experience of Political Defeat (Verso, 2024). She is a member of the Radical Philosophy editorial collective and a contributing editor at Parapraxis. She is currently interested in revenge.
www.hannahproctor.com
Lonesome Ghosts was first shown at Peer, London in Autumn 2025, as part of a solo exhibition by Daniel Ward of the same title.