Art Fund has announced that Bristol Museum & Art Gallery and The Hunterian, Glasgow, will each receive £200,000 from the Moving Image Fund scheme to build their collections of artists' film and video. Towner Art Gallery, Eastbourne, and the Whitworth, Manchester, who joined the pilot scheme in 2015, will remain as participants in an expanded portfolio of organisations, with the Whitworth announcing its latest acquisition through the Moving Image Fund: Elizabeth Price's 'K'

In a new partnership, FVU and Art Fund will together provide over £40,000 for each museum to commission a new work for their respective collections - supported by FVU's longstanding curatorial and production expertise. These works will then join each organisation’s collection with exhibitions and displays of the new works to be announced.

FVU’s touring exhibition Changing Places arrives at Osterley Park and House on 25 November, illuminating the Jersey Galleries in the basement of the house with contemporary artists’ video work. A six-screen video installation, a filmic exploration of an abandoned power station and an installation of sound and objects will remain in the galleries all winter, offering a creative way to explore the property’s historic connections.

Read the full press release here, or visit our What's On page to find out more.

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Image: Changing Places in its previous staging at Roundhouse in Birmingham. Photographer: Jana Eastwood

We have created an exciting new role - Head of Development, Partnerships and Patrons - and are looking for an experienced and successful fundraiser with an excellent track record of obtaining funds from charitable trusts and foundations, high net-worth individuals, and private and public sector bodies, to manage a varied portfolio of supporters and develop new funding prospects in order to give FVU greater creative programming freedoms and possibilities.

Find out more and apply: fvu.co.uk/opportunities

Moving Image Fund for Museums: second round open for applications. Deadline: 30 October 2017

FVU is working with Art Fund to enable galleries and museums to build their public collections of artists' film. Between 2018 and 2022 we will be commissioning four new works in partnership with four galleries. The first two venues to benefit are the Towner Art Gallery, Eastbourne, and the Whitworth, Manchester. Two more venues will be added for round two, which is now open for applications. 

FVU’s touring exhibition of contemporary art arrives at Cliffe Castle on Saturday 21 October. Four artworks will be presented amongst the museum’s collection, including an installation of dust and an interactive soundscape that brings a sacred forest into the Grand Drawing Room.

Read the full press release here, or visit our What's On page to find out more.

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National Trust property Quarry Bank hosts the fifth in a nationwide series of exhibitions as part of FVU's Changing Places. Now installed in the cotton mill are four video works by artists Ravi Agarwal, Omar Chowdhury, Desire Machine Collective and Yasmin Jahan Nupur. The artworks examine the contemporary resonance of industrialisation, looking at the movement of people who are seeking work, the creation and abandonment of monumental buildings, and the confluence of work and community. The placement of these films at Quarry Bank bridges the gap between the changes currently occurring across South Asia, and the historic places in Britain where the blueprint for industrialisation began.

Visit our What's On page to find out more.

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One of eight venues on the Changing Places national tour, Hastings Museum & Art Gallery now hosts two contemporary artworks amongst its historic collection - a large-scale video projection showing an abandoned power station in the north of India, and a newly-commissioned installation of objects and sound that is inspired by the museum’s colonial artefacts and their collector Lady Brassey. The exhibition runs from 15 September - 29 October 2017.

Read the full press release here, or visit our What's On page to find out more.

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New Commission: Hetain Patel, Don't Look at the Finger

Don’t Look at the Finger is a major new moving-image work by artist Hetain Patel, which will premiere in simultaneous solo exhibitions at QUAD in Derby and at Manchester Art Gallery, opening 29 & 30 September respectively.

The film follows a ceremonial ‘fight’ between two protagonists, a man and a woman, in the grand architectural setting of a church. The way the characters communicate is a feat of choreography that combines Kung Fu with signed languages to express a ritualistic coming together.

Their initial gestures, extravagant and small, possess an intimacy and deliberation that seems to apprehend what is about to take place. As movements amplify, the pair begin to test each other; gradually uncovering strengths, weaknesses and predictabilities. Patel then uses shape-shifting costumes to kick the performance to a different level – the wedding garb miraculously metamorphosing into full-blown Kung Fu costume. As the fight progresses, the couple’s hand-to-hand combat continues to hint at the passionate exchanges and ever-shifting power struggles of a relationship.

Characteristic of Patel’s work, Don’t Look at the Finger creates a blend of signifiers set to challenge assumptions. The film encompasses Hollywood cinema, West African characters and costumes, East Asian martial arts, and a specially composed musical score that sets a transforming backdrop to the fusing of them all. The work’s title comes from one of Kung Fu master Bruce Lee’s most celebrated sayings, which warns us never to be distracted by a finger that is pointing at something lest we miss what it is pointing at. This seems especially relevant to the art of Hetain Patel, which once again beckons us in one direction only to reveal that its real substance lies elsewhere.

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As part of the Changing Places tour, the National Waterways Museum in Ellesmere Port hosts three artists’ films projected amongst its exhibits within the Island Warehouse and on board Bigmere, a cargo vessel moored in the Victorian docks. The exhibition runs from 11 August - 17 September 2017.

Read the full press release here, or visit our What's On page to find out more.

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For the inaugural year of the Michael O’Pray Prize, it has been decided to double the prize money we had set aside and give two awards, to two young writers whose fluency, clarity and commitment to their subject stood out from a shortlist of other strong candidates. Congratulations to Lauren Houlton and Dan Ward, who as well as the sum of £500 each, will be offered the opportunity to write a new text for Art Monthly. The panel of judges consisted of Steven Bode, Director, Film and Video Umbrella, Chris McCormack, Associate Editor, Art Monthly, writer and teacher Lucy Reynolds and artist, John Smith. 

The Michael O’Pray Prize is a Film and Video Umbrella initiative, in partnership with Art Monthly. Supported by University of East London and Arts Council England.

Find out more
 

Changing Places is Film and Video Umbrella’s national tour of contemporary artists’ video, and it’s coming to the Roundhouse in Birmingham, 21-23 July 2017. The tour presents a series of exhibitions inside historic buildings across the country, showing video and photography by international artists. The Roundhouse is one of ten participating venues, creating a rare opportunity to explore areas of this hidden gem before it undergoes restoration.

Read the full press release here, or visit our What's On page to find out more.

@FilmVidUmbrella #PlacesChanging

Image: STONEWORK, Omar Chowdhury (video still) Courtesy of the artist.

Maeve Brennan and Imran Perretta are today announced recipients of the fifth edition of the Jerwood/FVU Awards.

The project has awarded £20,000 to each artist, both within the first five years of their practice, to develop significant new moving-image works. The finished films will be shown from 6 April to 3 June 2018 at Jerwood Space, London, before touring across the UK.

The 2018 curatorial theme Unintended Consequences addresses how the best-laid plans can unravel and well-intentione d actions can provoke unexpected side-effects. In an echo of this theme, and at a moment when world events are so volatile and turbulent that it’s hard to predict what might happen next, the two artists’ proposals reflect the complex, entangled nature of contemporary experience. 

Highlighting the whirring presence of wind turbines in the landscape, Maeve Brennan’s proposed work considers their ripple effects in the larger ecosystem. Forward-thinkingly green and benign, their arrival can have unanticipated outcomes, reminding us how the rhythms and patterns of the natural environment are intricately connected and interdependent.

At a time when social and geopolitical upheaval has prompted the mass displacement and migration of people across the globe, Imran Perretta’s proposed work examines how the face of the refugee has been dehumanised, often anonymised, and frequently demonised, by contrasting the personal testimony of asylum seekers with public perception and popular iconography.

The artists were selected from over 170 applications by Noor Afshan Mirza, artist and co-founder of no.w.here; George Vasey, currently working as a curator on the Turner Prize 2017 and curatorial fellow at Newcastle University; Steven Bode, Director, FVU; and Sarah Williams, Head of Programme, Jerwood Visual Arts.

Over the past four editions the Jerwood/FVU Awards have provided a significant platform for its selected artists, with many of the recipients gaining further critical recognition following their exhibitions at Jerwood Space. 2013 winner Ed Atkins had his first solo exhibition at MoMA, New York, that same year, and has gone on to exhibit at Serpentine Gallery and Kunsthalle Zurich. 2015 winner Marianna Simnett has also exhibited at Serpentine Gallery and Seventeen, New York, and has been included in group shows at CAC, Shanghai; Connecting Spaces, Hong Kong; and CCA, Glasgow. 2017 winner Lawrence Lek participated in group shows at Ullens Centre for Contemporary Art, Beijing; HyperPavilion, Venice; Hull UK City of Culture and Art Night, London (forthcoming).

The two new commissions will be exhibited at Jerwood Space 6 April – 3 June 2018. More information can be found at JerwoodFVUawards.com #JerwoodFVUawards

Image: Maeve Brennan, The Drift, 2017 (video still). Produced by Chisenhale Gallery, London and Spike Island, Bristol. Commissioned by Chisenhale Gallery; Spike Island; The Whitworth, The University of Manchester; and Lismore Castle Arts, Lismore. Courtesy of the artist. 

Film and Video Umbrella presents Changing Places, a series of exhibitions staging contemporary artists’ moving image within ten historic buildings across the country. Launching: 7 July, The House Mill, London

Featured artists: Bani Abidi, Ravi Agarwal, Imran Channa, Omar Chowdhury, Desire Machine Collective, Yasmin Jahan Nupur

At the core of the project lies the narrative of industrialisation and its global legacy: a mode of production that has choreographed migration, created monumental buildings and shaped social attitudes. Through the pairing of specific sites and artworks, Changing Places bridges the chronological and geographical gaps between the industrialisation currently occurring across South Asia, and the places in Britain where the blueprint began.  

In collaboration with several partners, including the Canal & River Trust and National Trust, ten buildings have been invited to host artworks that resonate with their locations. Each site has been curated to place local histories within an international context, underlining globally intertwined stories of places and people. The majority of the locations selected are non-gallery spaces. In some instances, the presence of Changing Places will open rarely seen interiors to the public, or bring a fresh perspective to buildings that have recently undergone or are currently under renovation.

The tour begins at The House Mill, London, on 7 July, with a newly commissioned installation piece by Imran Channa, and video works by Bani Abidi, Omar Chowdhury and Desire Machine Collective, presented throughout the Grade 1 listed 18th century tidal mill. Specially arranged guided tours will lead visitors through narrow passageways to a hidden work on the upper floor. A guided tour schedule is available here. (Please note that these tours take visitors into the Grain Bins in the heart of the old mill, and are not accessible for those who cannot walk unaided).

The national tour features six artists: Bani Abidi, Ravi Agarwal, Imran Channa, Omar Chowdhury, Desire Machine Collective and Yasmin Jahan Nupur. All live in, work in, or retain a connection to Bangladesh, India, or Pakistan. Presented in 2017, during the 70th anniversary of Indian independence, these artists’ works cover a range of perspectives and situations, from international migration and border-transcending environmental impacts, to the individual who navigates and responds to shifting social and economic circumstances. 

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Prime Time is the title of both a new film commission and the first major solo exhibition in a public gallery by the artist Rob Crosse. Through his films and photographs, Crosse studies the collective and private behaviour within organised social groups made up predominantly of men. Focusing his attention towards amateur societies, such as a slot car racing club or a railway signalling group, Crosse spends long periods of time with the participants who become the eventual subjects of his work. Through this research and personal involvement, his work becomes a platform from which to construct intimate and reflective portraits while unearthing unexpected moments of exchange between his subjects. 

Crosse’s latest film Prime Time (2017) will be shown for the first time in the exhibition and has been commissioned by FVU with Grundy Art Gallery. The film focuses on a group of older gay men who are part of a social society called ‘Prime Timers’ as they undertake an organised cruise. The filming of the ship’s interminable journey towards the horizon becomes an allegory for the search these men undertake by coming together to enrich their lives through communal activity. Prime Time examines what it means to be in the prime of one’s life and seeks to challenge the hyper-visibility of youth, and its primacy as a measure of desirability, to the exclusion of older bodies.

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Two newly commissioned moving-image works by recipients of the 2017 Awards, Patrick Hough and Lawrence Lek, will premiere at an exhibition at Jerwood Space, London, 22 March - 14 May 2017.  

In response to 2017's curatorial theme, Neither One Thing or Another, Hough and Lek both employ pioneering, conceptually fitting, technologies to examine the steadily blurring line between the real and the artificial. In Geomancer, Lek harnesses his trademark - the building blocks of computer gaming technology - to set the stage for an awakening of artificial intelligence. Hough’s film And If In A Thousand Years takes us to the Californian desert, where the landscape was filmed and digitally scanned using LiDAR, to host a Hollywood-inspired merging of authenticity and replica. Both works delve between definitions of consciousness, and in the process invite us to look again at what we think we know and see.

Since their selection in May 2016, the artists have each received £20,000 to develop the works, with full production support from FVU. Following their debut at Jerwood Space in London, the films will tour as a series of screening events nationwide.