[LuxWeeklyNews] LUX Weekly News 12th – 18th March 2007 EVENTS AND OPENINGS IN LONDON THIS WEEK

[luxweekly at lux.org.uk]

LUX Weekly News 12th  – 18th March 2007
EVENTS AND OPENINGS IN LONDON THIS WEEK

Fine art to film panel event (including pre-event screening at  
5.30pm), ICA 1, Monday 12th March 6.30pm
Marjut Rimminen: Learned by heart, Animation from Finland, Curzon  
Soho, Tuesday 13 March 2007, at 6pm
Kevin McCoy in conversation, NFT 3, Wednesday 14th March, 6pm
Jennifer & Kevin McCoy: Tiny, Funny, Big and Sad, BFI Southbank  
Gallery, 14th March - 28th May
Parallel Ensemble: a momentary companion to Various Small Fires, Film  
and video programme, Royal College of Art, Saturday 17th March, 4pm
Damon Packard: Lost in thinking, sketch, 17 March - 28 April
Semiconductor Films, Part of Optronica  Festival, NFT3, Sat 17 March,  
4.10pm
Projected Light & Colour: Early Visual Music Colour Organs & Light  
Shows, Ilustrated talk by Cindy Keefer, Part of Optronica  Festival,  
NFT 1, Sun 18 March, 3.15pm


LUX LONDON EVENTS CALENDAR the most comprehensive daily listing of  
artists' moving image events, screenings and exhibitions in London  
www.lux.org.uk/resources/calendar.htm

1.

Monday 12th March 6.30pm
Fine art to film panel event (including pre-event screening at 5.30pm)
ICA 1
The Mall
www.birds-eye-view.co.uk
TO BOOK: Tickets £8.00/£7.00 concessions, £6.00 for members
Booking details: The ICA box office is open daily 12pm - 9.15pm. Buy  
tickets online at
www.ica.org.uk or call 020 7930 3647 during opening hours. Textphone:  
020 7839 0737

A highlight of a brand new series of cross arts at the Birds Eye View  
Film Festival is the FINE ART TO FILM event, in partnership with Film  
London’s Artist Moving Image Network. Is fine art film if it’s shown  
in the cinema? How is a film affected by being shown in a gallery?  
When is an artist an artist and when is she a filmmaker?
Fine Art To Film explores the increasingly regularly crossed boundary  
between fine art and film in a panel discussion with groundbreaking  
artists & filmmakers including Carol Morley, Clio Barnard and Laurie  
Simmons, showing stunning and thought provoking extracts of their  
work including ‘The Family’ from Turner Prize winner Gillian Wearing.

Fine Art to Film is preceded by a screening of acclaimed photographer  
Laurie Simmons’ The Music Of Regret – a cinematic musical film  
starring Meryl Streep and various puppets.

2.

Tuesday 13 March 2007, at 6pm
MARJUT RIMMINEN: LEARNED BY HEART
Animation from Finland
Curzon Soho
99 Shaftesbury Avenue, London, W1D 5DY
Nearest Tube: Leicester Square / Piccadilly Circus Box Office: 0870  
756 4620 Tickets: £5.50 / £4.50 concessions
www.curzoncinemas.com
www.animateonline.org

British artists’ moving-image project animate! and The Finnish  
Institute are proud to present the international premiere of a  
remarkable new autobiographical animation by multi-award-winning  
Finnish filmmaker Marjut Rimminen.

LEARNED BY HEART (UK/Finland, 2007, 30 mins), commissioned as part of  
Finland’s 90th anniversary of independence celebrations, is a charged  
and deeply personal creative collaboration with composer and co- 
director Paivi Takala. The film¹s five episodes explore the little- 
charted legacies of Finland’s post-war period, digging deep into the  
unspoken stories, misunderstandings and mysteries that a child in  
that period experienced.

Composed around hymns sung in school assembly, choral motifs dominate  
the soundtrack and recall memories of a time when they were an  
intimate element in everyday life. The visual narrative is created  
from archive materials and still photographs from old family albums.  
These images capture forgotten, even buried, emotional memories and  
through manipulation they release a raw and unencumbered energy.

Sister to the allusive, lyrical works of fellow Finnish artist Eija- 
Liisa Ahtila, LEARNED BY HEART steps unflinchingly into the charged  
territory of generational relations, historical amnesia and the  
secret agendas of the human heart, where a shared silence yields to  
final forgiveness.

Rimminen was an early pioneer of desktop digital animation, using  
equipment that in other hands (and hearts) might have been little  
more than toys for the boys.

Also showing will be her strikingly unsettling 1996 multi-Grand-Prix- 
winning work MANY HAPPY RETURNS (UK, 1996, 8 mins), plus her  
startling account of a brutalised life, SOME PROTECTION (UK, 1987, 9  
mins). She will be in conversation with Gareth Evans (editor of  
Vertigo magazine) after the screening, when details of this year’s  
animate! television commissioning process will also be announced.

3.
Wednesday 14th March, 6pm
Kevin McCoy in conversation
NFT3
www.bfi.org.uk
Free. Booking essential.

Join us for an exclusive evening event when artist Kevin McCoy will  
be in conversation with Chus Martinez (Director, Frankfurt  
Kunstverein) and Michael Connor (Head of Exhibitions). This is your  
chance to find out first-hand about the McCoys' new exhibition 'Tiny,  
Funny, Big and Sad' and their long-standing multimedia collaboration.

sing homespun hobby skills and robotic choreography, the McCoys  
create miniature film sets that spy on themselves and generate their  
own cinema sequences. Michael Connor, Head of Exhibitions, suggests  
that small is beautiful, but cute it isn't.

4.
14th March - 28th May
Jennifer & Kevin McCoy: Tiny, Funny, Big and Sad
BFI Southbank Gallery
Theatre Avenue, London SE1
Tuesday to Sunday 11am - 8pm
Admission free
www.bfi.org.uk

Artistic collaborators Jennifer and Kevin McCoy have earned  
international renown for works that mix film fandom and geek chic,  
exploring the strange realities of a hi-tech, mass-media society and  
bringing fantastic worlds to life.

The McCoys make their London debut with Tiny, Funny, Big and Sad, an  
exhibition that mixes model-making and customised computer software  
to reflect on the experience of cinema-going and to re-invent the  
role of the viewer.

In the words of Surrealist writer Georges Legrand, "Nobody sees the  
same film."

The Traffic series (2004), installed in the Gallery, recreates the  
artists' personal memories, each telling the story of a particular  
time, place or event that has become linked to the memory of viewing  
a specific film. One work in the series depicts the McCoys' second  
date, when they went to see Godard's film Week End at a cinema in  
Paris. Another recreates a more sombre evening spent in the cardiac  
ward, watching American Graffiti on a standard-issue hospital TV set.

The Constant World, installed in the foyer, is a newly commissioned  
work using a giant plasma screen and 36 live video cameras. A  
miniature film set on a many-armed mobile is suspended from the  
ceiling. It depicts a film noir-style story set in an imaginary city  
based on New Babylon, the unrealised brainchild of Dutch artist  
Constant Nieuwenhuys.

Constant's city was conceived as a 'camp for nomads on a planetary  
scale', a space where you could move freely between temporary  
habitats constructed to meet your every physical and emotional need.  
The McCoys' installation, in contrast, is a space for cinematic  
nomads. As a nomad, you can move freely around the film set, find  
your own parallels between images, and change your relationship with  
the image on the screen. You are asked to navigate physically in the  
way that you mentally navigate any film or video. Each time you go to  
the cinema or turn on the television, you bring your own ideas,  
interpretations and memories to the images on the screen.

Tiny, Funny, Big and Sad is a celebration of this cinematic nomadism,  
and it reminds us that viewing is an adventure, a journey and a  
creative act.

5.

Saturday 17th March, 4pm
Parallel Ensemble: a momentary companion to Various Small Fires
Film and video programme
Lecture Theatre 1
Royal College of Art
Kensington Gore
London SW7 2EU
www.rca.ac.uk
www.cca.rca.ac.uk/varioussmallfires

Various Small Fires
An exhibition organised by MA Curating Contemporary Art graduating  
students featuring international artists:

Ei Arakawa, Tony Chakar, Kajsa Dahlberg, Carmen Gheorghe, Knut Henrik  
Henriksen, Ian Kiaer, Koo Jeong-A, Laurent Montaron, Dominique  
Petitgand, Josephine Pryde, Florian Pumhösl.

For Various Small Fires, eleven artists were invited to produce a  
range of work that reflects on physical and psychological space, in  
response to the Royal College of Art galleries. Physically  
transforming the galleries, these interventions range from the subtle  
to the imposing.

6.

17 March - 28 April
Damon Packard: Lost in thinking
the gallery
sketch
9 Conduit Street, London W1S 2XG
Tube: Oxford Circus/Piccadilly Circus
tel. +44 (0)870 777 4488
www.sketch.uk.com
Open Tuesday – Saturday, 10am – 5pm
Free admission

Lost in the Thinking began as something (I still don't know exactly  
what) much smaller, with no time to complete and too many computer  
problems, expanded into a surreal meditation on hopelessness and  
pointlessness as guided by the Arthur Frain/Merlin character from  
Boorman's "Zardoz". Damon Packard, 2005
sketch is pleased to present the first UK solo exhibition of cult- 
filmmaker Damon Packard, featuring a retrospective of Packard’s  
shorts, features and fictional trailers that appropriate and revel in  
the vocabulary of 1970s Hollywood movies and classic sci-fi flicks.

Best known for his use of guerrilla marketing tactics to promote his  
2002 film Reflections of Evil-–for which he left over twenty two  
thousand copies of the DVD around Los Angeles financed by an  
inheritance from his grandmother—LA based filmmaker Damon Packard has  
written, directed, produced and starred in a prolific body of work  
over the past two decades. Highly influenced by a 1970s b-movie  
aesthetic, his pessimistic critique of the lack of creativity within  
the contemporary Hollywood system is seen in all of his films, from  
the attack on George Lucas in Untitled Star Wars Mockumentary to his  
playful representation of a young Spielberg in Reflections of Evil.  
His films simultaneously pay tribute to influential peers such as  
Lars Von Trier and Alexander Sukurov.

In response to his collaboration with John Russell and Mark Beasley  
on their project The Thinking, developed for the Grizedale Arts/ PS1  
exhibition Romantic Detachment, Packard produced Lost in the  
Thinking. Disrupting and discarding formal narrative progression,  
Lost in the Thinking is a film typical of Packard’s low-budget,  
palimpsest-like approach, interspersing and interrupting his own  
footage with distorted images taken from film genres as diverse as  
documentary and horror.

7.

Sat 17 March, 4.10pm
Semiconductor Films
Part of Optronica  Festival
NFT3
Tickets £8.60, £6.25 (BFI Members pay £1 less)
www.optronica.org

Over the past few years Semiconductor's Ruth Jarman and Joseph  
Gerhardt have created an arresting stream of sound films, music  
videos, live cinema performances and multimedia installations that  
explore the new terrain to be found deep within the cracks now  
forming between the visual and the auditory. In this session they  
present a selection of their works and talk about their influences,  
inspirations and processes. Followed by a Q&A.

8.

Sun 18 March, 3.15pm
Projected Light & Colour: Early Visual Music Colour Organs & Light Shows
llustrated talk by Cindy Keefer
Part of Optronica  Festival
NFT1
Tickets £8.60, £6.25 (BFI Members pay £1 less)
www.optronica.org

 From the first known colour organ experiments in the 1700s to Oskar  
Fischinger’s multiple projector light shows of the 1920s, through to  
some legendary 1960s light shows, key examples of visual music's long  
rich but little known history will be explored in this talk.  
Presented by Cindy Keefer from the LA-based Centre for Visual Music  
and illustrated by slides and rare film footage, colour organs and  
light shows are contextualised as precursors to modern VJ and  
audiovisual culture.


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