UnSpooling \ Artists & Cinema (2010)

AND’s paean to cinema! UnSpooling invited artists and spectators to join in the act of navigating and constructing cinema. Presenting over 20 international artists we explored a field where cinema – as experience, language, history and artefact is identified as potent material for artistic production.

Reinvented visual technologies and forensically dissected iconic scenes demonstrate how artists have been critically recycling cinematic history. Revealing the fundamental illusory nature of celluloid, whilst also challenging the dominant digital model.

Highlights of UnSpooling included screenings of Michaël Borremans the German which positioned the self in the distorted scale of a theatre and the UK Premiere of Ming Wong’s world-cinema re-enactment, Life and Death in Venice.

Full Programme

Michaël Borremans (Belgium) / David Claerbout (Belgium) / Roman Kirschner (Austria) / Wayne Lloyd (UK) / Elizabeth McAlpine (UK) / Sheena Macrae (Canada) / Juhana Moisander (Finland) / Alex Pearl (UK) // Mario Rossi (UK) / Gebhard Sengmüller (Austria) / Harald Smykla (Germany) / Ming Wong (Singapore) / Stefan Zeyen (Germany)

Artists’ Clinic
Artists’ Clinic consisted of quick fire diagnostics and ‘artistic examinations’ posing questions about the production, identity and normal experience of cinema. As well as offering facts about the artists and their work, audiences could make appointments for their own personal check-up – a more in-depth conversation with artists in Unspooling.

UnSpooling Artists in Residence
Alex Pearl and Juhana Moisander were in residency with AND during 2010. Pearl produced short films largely unplanned and improvised working with a small evolving troupe of actors, both human and artificial, while Moisander references mythology and early cinema to produce ghost-like encounters in intriguing single-take films.

Hell is a City (Performance)
Wayne Lloyd
Wayne Lloyd re-told Val Guest’s famous Manchester-set 60’s crime film, Hell is a City, with a one-off spoken-word and drawing performance that marked the launch of UnSpooling – Artists and Cinema.

Movie Protocol (Screening)
Harold Smykla
During the private view of UnSpooling – Artists & Cinema, Harald Smykla performed a new Movie Protocol, in which the artist records every camera shot as an evolving Hieroglyphic-esque scroll drawing on a OHP. He recored the first film ever to be shown at Cornerhouse (now HOME), Nick Roeg’s Insignificance.