Marianna Simnett's 2019 FVU-commissioned film The Bird Game features in the group exhibition "For The Birds" at Museum für Gegenwartskunst Siegen.
Based on artistic positions and works from the collections of the Museum für Gegenwartskunst Siegen, “For the Birds” examines the significance of birds in various contexts. “For the Birds” is an exhibition for seeing and hearing. Incorporating a wide variety of media, the works on display link ecological, philosophical, social and political issues. The exhibition is dedicated to the cultural relevance of birds in contemporary artistic narrative spaces.
The Bird Game is a wicked fairy tale in which a loquacious and bloodthirsty crow, voiced by Joanne Whalley, lures six children to a secluded mansion and snares them in a sequence of deranged games. It mixes dismembered parts of Sleeping Beauty and Ovid’s Metamorphoses into a sinister witch’s brew. Crow may be a villain but she is also an enchantress, a masterful storyteller and, in her climactic retelling of how she became a bird, a strange and scarred kind of heroine. Also featured in this hellish tale of childhood and transformation are a wolf-haunted lullaby, dirty Disney costumes, eels, and an enucleated eyeball. – Text by Charlie Fox.
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Co-commissioned by the Rothschild Foundation, Frans Hals Museum, and Film and Video Umbrella. FVU is supported using public funding by the National Lottery through Arts Council England.
