film Archives - Page 6 of 7 - Bonington Gallery

Join us for a free, online film screening on YouTube curated by artists Sophie Cundale and Ben Gomes.

What You Could Have Won is a contemporary interpretation of chaos, where relics from childhood return to destabilise our notions of reality. The online screening evokes spirits from the past, exploring subconscious energies that lie in the underbellies of power and popular culture. Artists’ works are combined with other video fragments, a drift through cartoonish cynics, unblinking zombie cultures and folkloric futures.

The screening includes works by Karen Kilimnik, Jennifer Martin, Chloée Maugile, Chris Michael, and Andrew

Content Warning

Schedule

Mr Blobby Goes Shopping (Extract, sound design by Saul Rivers at CODA): 1 min 40 sec

Sophie Cundale and Ben Gomes, Nativity Part 1, 2016, Mini DV transferred to digital: 3 min 12 sec

Karen Kilimnik, Kate Moss at the Beginning, 1996, VHS transferred to HD file: 7 min (Courtesy of the artist and Sprüth Magers Gallery)

Chloée Maugile, At Dawn: Good Manners To Look Good, 2020, 16mm transferred to HD file: 5 min 7 sec (With special thanks to Charlie Hope, Hatty Coward and Nadia Correia for lighting donation)

Sophie Cundale and Ben Gomes, Nativity Part 2, 2016, Mini DV transferred to digital: 11 min

Biographies

Sophie Cundale (b. 1987) is an artist living and working in London. Previous work has been commissioned by Serpentine Galleries and the South London Gallery; screened at Temporary Gallery, Cologne; Spike Island, Bristol; Govett-Brewster Gallery, New Zealand; Catalyst Arts, AMINI festival, Belfast; VCD festival, Beijing and Innsbruck Biennale, Austria; and hosted on vdrome.org. The Near Room at the South London Gallery is her first major solo exhibition, and travels in November 2020 to Bonington Gallery, Nottingham.

Ben Gomes (b. 1989) is an artist living and working in London. His work includes painting, performance and writing. Recent exhibitions include Get Out of My Office curated by Daniel Neofetou and The Painting Show at All Hallows Church curated by Ruth Angel Edwards. Recent collaborations with Adam Gallagher have been exhibited at Lima Zulu and Auto Italia.

Karen Kilimnik (b.1955) has diverse practice that draws upon the tradition of Romantic painting, and utilises painting, drawing, collage, photography, video and installation to produce nuanced and playful observations of historical codes and symbols. Revelling in both mass and high culture, George Stubbs, Jean-Baptiste Oudry and the ballet are as important for Kilimnik as The Avengers, Kate Moss and pop music, forcing such distinctions to collapse into her own specific mélange of cultural influence and production.

Jennifer Martin (b. 1990) is an artist-filmmaker living and working in London. Recent solo exhibitions and commissions include TEETH, Primary, Nottingham; Channel 6, Turf Projects, London; and Britain Been Rotten, Cypher Billboards, London. She has screened work in the UK and abroad at Art Licks Weekend, London; 36 Kasseler Dokfest, Kassel; B3 Biennial, Frankfurt; and European Media and Art Festival 32, Osnabrück. Martin is a co-director of the artist workers’ cooperative not/nowhere, which is run by black artists and artists of colour and focuses on photochemical film, audio, and digital practices.

Since 2017 Chloée Maugile has written and directed plays and short films for institutions such as The V&A, The Young Vic and The Block. She graduated from Slade School of Art in 2019 and currently lives and works in London. Maugile will be premiering a new work, ‘At Dawn: Good Manners To Look Good’, a short film featuring Anthony Gopaul, Dumas Maugile and Thom Murphy. Directed by Chloée Maugile, filmed by Nina Porter, styled by Thom Murphy and soundtrack created by Conrad Pack.

Artist and researcher Chris Michael lives and works in London and Basildon, UK. Michael engages with ideas orbiting pop-culture, class, nostalgia, fanaticism, desire, transformation, longing & labour. His work has been exhibited and screened internationally at institutions such as the Chisenhale, Whitechapel Gallery, Barbican and Southwark Park Galleries and has worked alongside and spoken at South London Gallery, The Woodmill, UAL and Newham Council among others. Michael is currently a visiting lecturer at the Royal College of Art on MA Visual Communication.

Andrew Norman Wilson (b.1983) is an artist and curator based between Europe and the United States. Recent exhibitions include Hirngespenster at the Kunstverein Braunschweig in 2019 (solo), Picture Industry at Luma Arles in 2018, Dreamlands at the Whitney Museum in 2017, and the Gwangju Biennial in 2016.

Bonington Gallery is pleased to present The Near Room (2020), a new moving-image work by the artist Sophie Cundale (b.1987).

The Near Room is a supernatural melodrama about loss that follows the journey of a professional boxer after a near-fatal knockout. The boxer’s disorientations become entangled with the story of a queen living with Cotard delusion, a rare neurological condition inducing the belief in and sensation of death.

The film’s title is taken from the boxer Muhammad Ali’s description of a vivid, hallucinatory space he would enter when in the depths of a fight – “A door swung half open [into a room of] neon, orange and green lights blinking, bats blowing trumpets and alligators playing trombones, snakes screaming. Weird masks and actors’ clothes hung on the wall, and if he stepped across the sill and reached for them, he knew that he was committing himself to his own destruction.” – George Plimpton, Shadow Box (1977).

The boxing scenes were filmed at long established south London boxing club, Lynn AC in Camberwell. The cast includes professional boxer John Harding Jnr., artist Penny Goring, and actor Chris New.

The Near Room is commissioned and produced by Film and Video Umbrella with support from Arts Council England, South London Gallery, Bonington Gallery, Curator Space and The Gane Trust. The film premiered at South London Gallery in April 2020 and due to COVID-19 was extended until September 2020.

Sophie Cundale (b.1987) lives and works in London. Her work has previously been commissioned by the Serpentine Galleries and the South London Gallery; screened at Temporary Gallery, Cologne; Spike Island, Bristol; Govett-Brewster Gallery, New Zealand; Catalyst Arts and Amini festival, Belfast; VCD festival, Beijing and Innsbruck Biennale, Austria; and hosted on vdrome.org. Cundale’s latest film The Near Room opened at South London Gallery in April 2020 and travels to Bonington Gallery, Nottingham in October 2020.

Content Guidence

Please be aware that this film includes moments of violence and blood, as well as sexual references which some viewers may find offensive and unsuitable for children.

Sophie Cundale, The Near Room, 2020. Courtesy of the artist and FVU. Photo: Jules Lister.

Screening Times (Monday-Friday)

Screening Times (Saturday)

The Near Room will also be available to view online every Sunday during the exhibition.

Exhibition Recourses:

Throughout the month of June, we have been sharing films and documentaries to raise awareness of injustices faced by Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Queer communities. June is Pride Month, commemorating the Stonewall riots in New York city in 1969, a key event that triggered the modern LGBT liberation movement in the United States and beyond.

1. Difficult Love (2010)

Difficult Love presents a lively personal take on the challenges facing Black lesbians in South Africa today. It features the life, photographs, work, friends and associates of visual activist and renowned photographer, Zanele Muholi (who also narrates the film).

2. LGBT Britain (various)

This colourful and challenging collection explores screen representations of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender lives over the past century.

3. Pose (2018-present)

A television series about New York City’s African American and Latino LGBTQ and gender-nonconforming ballroom culture scene in the 1980s and, in the second season, early 1990s.

4. Day Dream (2017)

Directed by Stephen Isaac-Wilson, Day Dream features artist and founder of club night Body Party Kareem Reid. Filmed on the first weekend of Spring, the short poetically explores issues of queer loneliness, male vulnerability, and platonic intimacy. Despite an improvement of the LGBT community’s rights and media representation over the years, queer people still disproportionately suffer from loneliness and social isolation.

5. The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson (2017)

Victoria Cruz investigates the mysterious 1992 death of black gay rights activist and Stonewall veteran, Marsha P. Johnson. Using archival interviews with Johnson, and new interviews with Johnson’s family, friends and fellow activists.

6. The Attendant (1993)

In this short film, the eponymous ‘attendant’ is a middle-aged black man who finds his homoerotic fantasies taking over the museum he supervises when a painting depicting scenes of slavery becomes a tableau vivant of sadomasochistic desire. With this work, Julien explores spatial temporalities in a museum context, commenting on queer history and racial boundaries.

7. Barbara Hammer – 2000s

Barbara Hammer is a pivotal figure in American experimental film and a pioneer of queer cinema — constructing revelations on gender, sexuality, community, and later illness and mortality. Working primarily with eight-millimetre, super 8 and 16-millimetre film, she produced nearly 70 films, ranging from experimental shorts to essay and full-length documentaries. As part of Company Gallery’s ‘In Company With’ series, a selection of films by Barbara Hammer are available for viewing online.

8. Disclosure (2020)

Disclosure is an eye-opening documentary film looking at transgender representation within film and media, featuring leading trans creatives and thinkers sharing perspectives and analysis about Hollywood’s impact on the trans community. Reframing familiar scenes and iconic characters in a new light, director Sam Feder invites viewers to confront unexamined assumptions, and shows how what once captured the American imagination now elicit new feelings. Disclosure provokes a startling revolution in how we see and understand trans people.

9. Before You Know It (2013)

Before You Know It is a 2013 documentary directed by PJ Raval following the lives of three gay seniors as they navigate the adventures, challenges and surprises of life and love in their golden years.

10. A Fantastic Woman (2017)

Marina’s life is thrown into turmoil following the death of her partner. Mourning the loss of the man she loved, she finds herself under intense scrutiny from those with no regard for her privacy.

Each of the artists explore queer space through film, focusing on differing geographies, from the club to landscapes, documenting the erasure and reclaiming of queer spaces. The artists utilise numerous techniques such as voice overs and verbatim theatre to explore both personal and collective subjectivity. Collectively the films explore queer desire, (in)visibility, relationships, resistance, collective action, and the body’s relationship to space and technology.

Films

Fleshback: Queer Raving in Manchester’s Twilight Zone (2018)
Stephen Isaac-Wilson
17 minutes

Biographies

Ian Giles completed his MFA in 2012 at the Slade School of Fine Art. He was a LUX Associate Artist 2012/13. Recent exhibitions and screenings include: Outhouse, Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge; Studio Four, OUTPOST, Norwich; Trojan Horse / Rainbow Flag, presented by Gasworks at Bethnal Green Working Men’s Club, London (all 2019); After BUTT, NY Art Book Fair, MoMA PS1, New York; Video Club: Sex Talks, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; After BUTT, Chelsea Space, London (all 2018). Ian was an inaugural winner of the Shannon Michael Cane Award in 2018. He was a New Geographies commissioned artist 2018-20 and is currently a recipient of the Jerwood New Work Fund.

Annette Kennerley is a writer and filmmaker based in London. She was born in Cheshire and started making films in the 1980s. She was awarded a BA in Fine Art (Film & Video) at Central Saint Martins College of Art & Design, London in 1991 and has worked mainly with Super 8 and 16mm film, experimenting with optical printing techniques and with the support of production awards from the Arts Council. Her work has exhibited at cinemas and film festivals nationally and internationally.

Annette’s films explore themes of childhood, motherhood, love, loss and sexuality. She draws on personal experiences in many of her films, though she has also made experimental documentaries with transgender people and directed a Transgender Film Festival at the LuxCinema for several years in the 1990s. She is also a writer and a teacher/mentor to young people.

Stephen Isaac-Wilson is a black queer London-based director who has directed ﬁlms for Channel 4, i-D, Victoria Miro and the Tate, and worked with artists including Jorja Smith, Isaac Julien and Klein. Stephen grew up in southeast London, and in 2013 was accepted onto the BBC’s prestigious production trainee scheme, where he began his ﬁlmmaking career. In 2015/16, he worked across the Emmy award-nominated series about LGBT rights, Gaycation, presented by Elliot Page.

Last year he was commissioned to direct a portrait ﬁlm for the Tate’s Queer British Art exhibit and also produced a 40-minute Mykki Blanco documentary about black queer alternative culture in Johannesburg. Stephen combines both his journalistic background with his visual art sensibilities, to tell beautifully emotive and thought-provoking stories.
His work has been screened at the ICA, Tate and the Barbican, as well as a ﬁlm festivals including Outfest and Iris Prize.

Charlotte Prodger lives in Glasgow and is represented by Hollybush Gardens and Koppe Astner. Last year she represented Scotland at Venice Biennale and won the Turner prize in 2018. Solo shows include Subtotal, Sculpture Center, New York (2017); BRIDGIT, Hollybush Gardens, London (2016); Kunstverein Düsseldorf (2016); 8004-8019, Spike Island, Bristol (2015); Nephatiti, Glasgow International (2014); Markets with The Block, Chelsea Space, London (2014) and Percussion Biface 1-13, Studio Voltaire (2012), London. Group shows and screenings include Lichtspiele, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin (2017); British Art Show 8 (2016); Weight of Data, Tate Britain, London (2015); The Secret Life, Murray Guy, New York (2015); An Interior that Remains an Exterior, Künstlerhaus Graz (2015); Assembly: A Survey of Recent Artists’ Film and Video in Britain, Tate Britain (2014), Holes in the Wall, Kunsthalle Freiburg (2013) and Frozen Lakes, Artists Space, New York (2013). Performances include Orange Helvetica Title Sequence, NY Book Art Fair, MOMA PS1 with Bookworks (2014).

The Other Film Club presents The Other Side Of The Underneath (1972), the only British feature film to have been directed by a feminist during the 1970s. Directed by Jane Arden, this powerful film explores the mind of a young woman diagnosed as a schizophrenic. Alleged madness is found to be an act of social oppression.

One of the most outspoken and radical feminist voices in British Theatre and cinema in the 1960s and 1970s, Arden has since been virtually silenced by her near-invisibility: her books long out of print, her plays unperformed, and her films unscreened until recently.

This event is the second in a series of screenings and discussions organised by The Other Film Club that forms research into the radical feminist and experimental filmmaker Jane Arden (1927-1982). The series is hosted by Paul Bryan, an MFA Fine Art student at Nottingham Trent University (NTU), with the support of Nottingham Contemporary, and in collaboration with Bonington Gallery. Paul will be joined in conversation with Susan Croft from Unfinished Histories. This event is a collaboration with the public programme for Waking the Witch: Old Ways, New Rites, hosted by Bonington Gallery from Friday 27 September to Saturday 16 November 2019.

An introductory performance by NTU’s recently graduated Fine Art students exploring Arden’s poetry and prose will be followed by an in-conversation between Susan Croft and Paul Bryan for exploring Arden’s artistic practice after the screening.

Content Guidance

Please note this film has an 18 certificate and contains explicit sexual images and nudity.

Other Film Club

The Other Film Club is a screening programme organised by Paul Bryan that has previously screened films regarding the practices of Sarah Lucas, About Sarah (2014) directed by Elisa Miller, I Don’t Belong Anywhere: The Cinema of Chantal Akerman (2015), directed by Marianne Lambert, and Penny Slinger Out Of The Shadows (2018), directed by Richard Kovitch.

Biographies

Jane Arden (1927-1982) was a Welsh film director, actress, screenwriter, playwright, songwriter and poet. The late 1960s and early 1970s saw Arden cementing her reputation as one of Britain’s leading feminist voices with such films as Separation (1967) and Anti-Clock (1979), the multimedia play Vagina Rex and the Gas Oven and A New Communion for Freaks, Prophets and Witches’ born out of the Theatre group set up by Arden called Holocaust. In 2009, her three films Separation, Anti-Clock, and The Other Side of the Underneath were restored and re-released by the BFI.

Susan Croft is a writer, curator, dramaturg, performance archive consultant and historian with special interests in women playwrights, black and Asian theatre in Britain, live art and new writing for performance. Unfinished Histories was established in 2006 by Croft and Jessica Higgs with the aim of recording the history of British alternative theatre between 1968 – 1988.

The Other Film Club presents Penny Slinger: Out of The Shadows (2019), a newly released documentary produced and directed by Richard Kovitch, that focusses on the practice and life of the radical artist, filmmaker and performer Penny Slinger. Out of The Shadows explores overlapping concerns in experimental narratives, female sexuality, the occult, and social taboos, as well as how the personal histories of artists can intertwine through radical alliance.

This event is the first in a series of screenings and discussions organised by The Other Film Club that forms research into the radical feminist and experimental filmmaker Jane Arden (1927-1982). Arden was a close collaborator of Penny Slinger where they co-artistic directed and were members of the feminist theatre group Holocaust. The series is hosted by Paul Bryan (MFA Fine Art student, Nottingham Trent University), with the support of Nottingham Contemporary and in collaboration with Bonington Gallery.

Following the screening, join Penny Slinger and Paul Bryan for an in-conversation exploring Slinger’s artistic practice and feminist surrealism.

Content Guidence

Please be aware this film has an 18 certificate and contains explicit sexual images and nudity.

Biography

Penny Slinger (b. 1947) is a British-American artist living and working in Los Angeles, California. Slinger created her first book 50% The Visible Woman while at college and exhibited her pioneering Feminist Surrealist collage work in Young and Fantastic at the Institute of Contemporary Art in 1969, followed by two solo exhibitions at the Angela Flowers Gallery, London, in 1971 and 1973. In 1971, Slinger joined Jane Arden’s first all-woman theatre troupe in England called Holocaust and performed in the feature film The Other Side of the Underneath (1972). Her work has been featured in major exhibitions internationally. Slinger’s upcoming solo exhibition Tantric Transformations will be on view from 28 June – 24 August 2019 at Richard Saltoun Gallery, London.

The Other Film Club

The Other Film Club is a screening programme organised by Paul Bryan that has previously screened films regarding the practices of Sarah Lucas, About Sarah (2014) directed by Elisa Miller, and I Don’t Belong Anywhere: The Cinema of Chantal Akerman (2015), directed by Marianne Lambert. Look out for a forthcoming screening of Jane Arden’s The Other Side of the Underneath (1972), the first feature film directed by a woman in the UK.

Coinciding with his current solo exhibition Now & Then, we’re delighted to screen Dick Jewell’s seminal 2002 documentary Kinky Gerlinky, bringing together footage shot at the legendary club night between 1990 and 1993.

Kinky Gerlinky was the biggest, most fabulous, most stylish nightclub London had ever seen. This documentary, edited from over 200 hours shot on 21 nights in the early nineties, conveys the experience of one full night out at the club. Flamboyant poses on the red carpet, debauchery on the dance floor, glamorous catwalk competitions and extravagant backstage action – this film captures it all.

By nature a fleeting phenomenon, club culture is rarely recorded on film in any depth. Kinky Gerlinky goes the distance, offering unique intimacy with its subject – with most of the action performed directly for the camera; the costumes are out-of-this-world, as are the attitudes. A welcome flashback to wilder clubbing days, it’s also a hilarious in-your-face examination of the cultural and sexual politics of celebrity and glamour.

Now & Then will be Dick Jewell’s most significant solo exhibition in recent years, bringing together a wide range of works produced over a 30-year period. Working across film, photography and photo-collage, Jewell has inhabited both gallery and commercial contexts, exhibiting his work internationally at institutions including the Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam) and Serpentine Gallery (London). He has also produced music videos and promos for musicians including Neneh Cherry and Massive Attack.

As the title suggests, Now & Then chronicles progression: both from a technological perspective through the shifting media across Jewell’s work, and also in regards to people, as demonstrated by Jewell re-visiting his seminal 1989 film Headcases (shot on Super 8) whereby he has repeated the same set of questions to the same subjects 30 years on.

Other key works that will be on display include The Box, a huge bank of 200 framed photographs that Jewell took from four TVs over seven days in 1980; Four Thousand Threads, which presents a ‘Chinese Whispers’ version of a Google image search; and an audience participatory work entitled War & Peace, in which visitors are encouraged to take selfies against a backdrop and disseminate them online.

In a world bombarding us with millions of images, Now & Then is just presenting a few thousand.

Installation view. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Julian Lister.

4000 Threads, 2015. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Julian Lister.

War & Peace, 2019. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Julian Lister.

The Box, 1980 (detail). Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Julian Lister.

Head2Head, 2019. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Julian Lister.

The Box, 1980. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Julian Lister.

Found Photos, 1978-1980. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Julian Lister.

Katherine Griffiths 1973-….Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Julian Lister.

Dermot & Natasha, 2005. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Julian Lister.

War & Peace, 2019 (detail). Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Julian Lister.

Exhibition resources:

Associated Events

From Our Blog

We’re delighted to start 2019 with a solo exhibition by photographer and filmmaker Dick Jewell.

Now & Then will be Jewell’s most significant solo show in recent years, bringing together a wide range of works produced over a 30-year period – spanning film, photography and photo-collage. In the meantime, check out this documentary commissioned by Dazed & Confused (directed by Jamie Roberts), which explores Jewell’s incredible archive of dance footage, with a cast including Vivienne Westwood, Neneh Cherry, Grandmaster Flash, skinheads, B-boys, drag queens and rave dancers – to name just a few…

Dick Jewell: Now & Then opens Friday 18 January. RSVP to join us for the preview on Thursday 17 January, 5 pm – 7 pm.

Last night we welcomed DJ, promoter and Butterz cofounder, Elijah for an engaging lecture and Q&A; tracing his journey into and through different areas of the music industry, exploring the importance of questioning everything, and what happens when “what if?” is turned into “why not?”…

Thanks to writer, critic (and grime fan) Jonathan P Watts for hosting, and to Ashley Holmes, whose 2017 film Everybody’s Hustling set the scene for the evening. It was great to welcome a lot of new faces to the gallery – so big thanks to everyone who joined us, too!