The Hallucinating Edge: Artist’s Moving Image from Scotland Screening and In-conversation

On December 20, “The Hallucinating Edge: Artist’s Moving Image from Scotland Screening and In-conversation” held at the Red Brick Art Museum. The screening event present ten moving image art works from Scottish artists and will include a discussion between Sophia Hao Director and Curator of the Cooper Gallery, Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design (DJCAD), University of Dundee, artist Sarah Forrest, and Alex Hetherington Curator at the Modern Edinburgh Film School. Their discussion will focus on the moving image practices of Scottish artists. The talk will be moderated by Xia Yanguo, Artistic Director of the Red Brick Art Museum.

The works featured in this screening event utilise various methodologies for the expression of their subjects, visibly between real and imagined worlds that traverse the past and the present. These artists hold up mirrors to their own lives and explore the potential to create and inhabit alter-egos.

A familiarity of subject and the mysteries of new discoveries overlap and in doing so stage and represent new possibilities. The pursuit of new ways of experiencing images is explored and some of the images become dimensional and sculptural. Artists have envisioned a future and offered the potential for experience of parts of that future now.

References from contemporary cinema and popular culture overlap with expressions of older worlds, ancient places, and past lives and biographies. Artists explore how beauty manifests itself in the most unexpected of places. In turn artists explore how they might, for a time, occupy different stories and timelines outside of themselves, all the while being in different places and times.

Language is explored as unreliable and open for interpretation. The contemporary is a place of endless layers and overlaps, the potential to meander through different narratives from past, present and future have become unlimited to us. In this screening artists can be seen in these halls of mirrors, offering them and us a place of self-reflection.

The Hallucinating Edge: Artist’s Moving Image from Scotland Screening and In-conversation is part of the project, CURRENT: Contemporary Art from Scotland, a two-year, four-stage exhibition of contemporary art with a concurrent discussion project, which is in partnership with the British Council. CURRENT will showcase the grassroots spirit and social and political dimensions of outstanding Scottish contemporary art in China for the first time.

The event will be hosted by Red Brick Art Museum, co-organised with Cooper Gallery, DJCAD, University of Dundee, UK, and the Modern Edinburgh Film School and is supported by the British Council.

Work list:
No.1:
Michelle Hannah, Outoftheblu_ (4:13)
No.2:
Katy Dove, Luna (2:48)
No.3:
Tom Varley, Violence. Silence (4:34)
No.4:
Dominic Watson, Like A Rolling Stone (3:34)
No.5:
Mairi Lafferty, LOVE (6:41)
No.6:
Oliver Mezger, Forgar noise, sound, sound, note, blow (15:00)
No.7:
Sarah Forrest, The Pot (5:20)
No.8:
Anne Colvin, Momentarea (3:25)
No.9:
Karen Cunningham, Development (8:21)
No.10:
Ross Sinclair, The Ballad of 20 Years of Real Life, extract, (20:00,only 10:00 extract to be played)

Speakers:
Sarah Forrest:
Sarah Forrest (b. 1981 Dundee) is an artist based in Glasgow. She graduated from Glasgow School of Art in 2010, during which time she studied at the Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam.

Recent exhibitions include: The Shock of Victory, CCA, Glasgow; Ripples in the Pond, GOMA, Glasgow; A Skull and a Screen, Taigh Chearsabhagh Museum and Arts Centre, North Uist, Concrete Ribs, Govanhill baths, Glasgow (all 2015), Mood is Made, Temperature is Taken, curated by Quinn Latimer, Glasgow Sculpture Studios; Reclaimed: The Second Life of Sculpture, Glasgow International; I will wear a plastic guise / I will wear a fabric guise, Dog Park, Christ Church, New Zealand (all 2014). Two Solo Shows: Sarah Forrest and Mounira Al Sohl (solo), CCA, Glasgow; Next to Perplexed you, curated by Jan Verwoert: Galerie Martin Janda, Vienna; You Blink at the Plughole, M.E.X.I.C.O, Leeds; Phenotypic Plasticity, with OaPaO (Mark Briggs, Amelia Bywater, and Rebecca Wilcox); ReMap 4, Athens (all 2013). Playing with undead things, curated by Andros Zins-Browne, Kortrijk, Belgium; Absence of Evidence is not Evidence of Absence (solo), Supplement, London; Magic Love Trade Objects, curated by Jan Verwoert, Geneva. In 2012 Sarah Forrest won the Margret Tait Residency Award.

Sophia Hao:
Sophia Hao is Director and Curator of Cooper Gallery, DJCAD, University of Dundee where she leads an experimental and integrated curatorial programme with a focus on critical discourse in contemporary art and visual culture. Notable curatorial projects to date include NOTES on a return (2009); a re-contextualisation of Performance Art in 1980s Britain, A CUT A SCRATCH A SCORE: A Comic Opera in Three Parts (2011); a process-led project expanded around a week-long performance by esteemed British sculpture and performance artist Bruce McLean that sought a critical position on the production, reproduction and circulation of knowledge, Studio Jamming: Artists’ Collaborations in Scotland (2014); a discursive survey that interrogated the legitimization of the grassroots characteristic of artists’ collaboration against the backdrop of the social and political conditions, and an ongoing international touring forum Hubs and Fictions (in collaboration with Edgar Schmitz).

Hao has published books, articles, catalogue essays, novels and poetry internationally. She is also the founder and editor of the contemporary art journal &labels. Her books include A CUT A SCRATCH A SCORE (2015) and NOTES on a return (2010). Her most recent book Hubs and Fictions: On Current Art and Imported Remoteness (co-edited with Edgar Schmitz) was published by Sternberg Press in 2016.

In 2014 Hao was awarded the Henry Moore Institute Research Fellowship. She was a panel member of Margaret Tait Award for artists’ film and moving image 2016/17.

Alex Hetherington:
Modern Edinburgh Film School (Alex Hetherington) produced a series of works and projects in 2013 across Edinburgh on the subject of film and sculpture including Ute Aurand: FILME at Stills, The Slow-Wave and Videotheque at Talbot Rice Gallery, The Hand that Holds the Desert Down, April Set: Sarah Forrest, Anthony Schrag and Zoë Fothergill, Lauren Gault: Granular and Crumb and Hold This Object Up Until There is Nothing Left of You at ESW, Green Screen at Embassy Gallery, 6000 Posters for Giants and Dwarfs at Rhubaba Gallery, and The Good Work at New Media Scotland, as well as a short residency at the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds. In 2014 it produced The Silver River and the National Review of Live Art, at Gallery of Modern Art, Glasgow for Atelier Public 2 programmed as part of Glasgow International and “A New Island Forming” for Annuale at Embassy Gallery and finished the year with the experimental writing publication Queer Information. In 2015 it produced the exhibition, print and screening project MOTHS at Summerhall, Edinburgh; the film programme, A Poetic Measurement, for Ripples on the Pond at GoMA and at off-site locations at GSS, Old Hairdressers and CCA and a publication project for Scottish Art News on Lauren Printy Currie, Jessica Ramm, Lyndsay Mann and Kirsty Hendry. In 2016 it screened an event on the films of Elín Jakobsdóttir for the CCA and is currently producing a work – Rerecording – on its archive, funded by an Edinburgh Visual Art award.