Artists' Film: Jarman Award Touring Programme 2020

Jenn Nkiru, BLACK TO TECHNO, 2019. Film still. Courtesy the artist
Jenn Nkiru, BLACK TO TECHNO, 2019. Film still. Courtesy the artist

Discover the incredible diversity of approaches in artists’ filmmaking in the UK, with a presentation of the work of the shortlist of this year’s Film London Jarman Award, which comes with £10,000 prize money. In this special online screening for 2020, the six artists present innovative, imaginative and immersive films that each address important topics faced by contemporary society.

The artists shortlisted this year are: Michelle Williams Gamaker, Hannah Quinlan and Rosie Hastings, Jenn Nkiru, Project Art Works, Larissa Sansour and Andrea Luka Zimmerman.

Inspired by visionary British filmmaker Derek Jarman, the Award recognises and supports artists working with the moving image. The shortlisted artists illustrate the spirit of inventiveness within moving image, highlighting the breadth of creativity and craftsmanship the medium has to offer, as well as its powerful ability to engage and provoke audiences.

The winner of the Film London Jarman Award will be announced on the 24 November. The award is presented in partnership with the Whitechapel Gallery, with support from Genesis Cinema.

Video links to each shortlisted work will be made available below on Thu 22 Oct from 12pm-12am.

Please book to register for an online in-conversation with artist Jenn Nkiru and Nottingham Contemporary’s Curator of Public Programmes and Research, Sofia Lemos. A link to the in-conversation will be made available on Thu 22 Oct.

Touring Programme 2020 includes:

Michelle Williams Gamaker, House of Women (2017) 14’17”

Hannah Quinlan and Rosie Hastings, In my Room (2020) 17’44”

Project Art Works, Illuminating the Wilderness (2019) 38’

Jenn Nkiru, BLACK TO TECHNO (2019), 20’

Larissa Sansour, In Vitro (2019) 28’

Andrea Luka Zimmerman, Civil Rites (2017) 28’

By signing up to this event you agree to have your email address shared with Nottingham Contemporary and Film London Artists’ Image Network (FLAMIN), the organisers of the Jarman Award, for the purpose of a post-event survey.

Michelle Williams Gamaker works with moving image, performance and installation. Her practice is often in dialogue with film history, particularly Hollywood and British studio films. By restaging scenes to reveal their politically problematic, imperialist roots; her work is a form of 'fictional activism​' to recast characters originally played by white actors with people of colour. She combines scriptwriting, workshopping with actors, revisiting analogue VFX and producing props to create intricately staged films.

Hannah Quinlan and Rosie Hastings are an artist duo working in film, drawing, installation and performance. Their work examines the behaviours, history, politics and artefacts of LQBTQ culture in the western context, exploring how this culture is reflective of broader societal structures. Their collaborative practice uses film as part documentary and research, and part cinematic experience with an expert use of sound, colour, and camerawork.

Project Art Works’ collaborations, projects, events and studio actions challenge societal definitions of care, creative intent, value, communication and identity. Their programmes evolve through studio practice and radiate out to the cultural and care sectors. Work is made visible through projects, collaborations, exhibitions, co-commissions, films, publications and digital platforms, increasing neurodiverse representation in programming, and deepening understanding and visibility.

Personalised and holistic studio environments are recreated wherever a project takes place. The studio is a place of level hierarchy where events and happenings unfold revealing the lived experience and qualities of all those involved. Artists and makers work together in purposeful collaboration using total communication that utilises gesture, sound, signing and empathy and as such is an expansive rather reductive form of connection.

Jenn Nkiru is an artist and filmmaker. Pushed through an Afro-surrealist lens, her practice is grounded in the history of Black music and the aesthetics of experimental film and international art cinema. Her work draws on the Black arts movement and the rich and variegated tradition of cinemas of the Black diaspora and their distinct experimentation with the politics of form. Her work blends elements of history, identity, politics, music, documentary and dance.

Larissa Sansour works mainly with film, and also produces installations, photos and sculptures. Central to her work is the dialectics between myth and historical narrative. Born in East Jerusalem, Palestine, her recent work use science fiction to address social and political issues.

Andrea Luka Zimmerman is an artist, filmmaker and cultural activist whose engaged practice focuses on marginalised individuals, communities and experience. It employs imaginative hybridity and narrative re-framing, alongside reverie and informed waywardness. Creative approaches include long-term observation, intervention, re-enactment and the use of found / archive materials, grounded in an honouring of lived realities. Alert to sources of radical hope, this work prioritises an enduring and equitable co-existence.

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