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Film and Video Umbrella is collaborating with Zoo Art Fair to present a Film and Video Programme at this year's event featuring recent work by Victoria Bernie, Marcus Coates, Simon Faithfull, Deborah Ligorio, Ruth Maclennan and Katie Paterson.
Showcasing the work of these six contemporary artists whose diverse approaches highlight the inventive, eclectic nature of much recent film and video practice, their shared preoccupations - not always apparent at first glance - are intriguingly illuminated over the course of this 50-minute programme.
Presented across two separate screens, and spilling out from the main projection space to intersect with other curatorial initiatives happening as part of the art fair, there is accent on audio and performance as primary creative impulses.
In Marcus Coates' sound-work Cadences, the last chords of various pieces of classical music conjure fleeting pastoral images of a faded English landscape, as delicate and as haunting as Katie Paterson's equally evocative recordings of the lingering echoes of fissuring, disappearing glaciers. Ecological portents of the fragility of existence reverberate further in Deborah Ligorio's Il Sonno and are brought into sharper, almost anatomical focus in Victoria Bernie's beguiling micro-landscapes. In Simon Faithfull's 0°00 Navigation the abstract marks we trace across the landscape act as a guiding precedent for a conceptual journey which combines documentary precision and trance-like reverie - an hallucinatory transfiguration of place and space that also distinguishes Ruth Maclennan's Capital (shot in the gleaming Kubla Khan metropolis of modern-day Kazakhstan).
Presenting an enlightening cross-section of practice engaging with diverse dialogues and modes of expression, many of the artists selected have worked or are working with Film and Video Umbrella as part of its main programme of activity. Marcus Coates' Cadence was commissioned as part of Waterlog, a major group exhibition presented by FVU in 2007, whilst FVU are currently developing a new work with Ruth Maclennan for presentation during 2009/10, Simon Faithfull's 0°00 Navigation is one of a series of journeys, including 30Km (an FVU commission) to be charted in a forthcoming FVU publication scheduled for 2009 release, whilst Victoria Bernie has received development support from the organisation. All four works were produced in 2007.
Royal Academy of Arts, 17-Oct-08 to 20-Oct-08
6 Burlington Gardens
London W1S 3EX
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