Exhibition

Screening Programme. Big Screen Southend

19 May 2021 – 29 Aug 2021

Regular hours

Monday
Closed
Tuesday
10:00 – 18:00
Wednesday
10:00 – 18:00
Thursday
10:00 – 18:00
Friday
10:00 – 18:00
Saturday
10:00 – 18:00
Sunday
10:00 – 18:00

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Focal Point Gallery

Southend-on-Sea
England, United Kingdom

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Travel Information

  • Southend Victoria/Southend Central
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About

Following a call for submissions last year, Focal Point Gallery is pleased to announce a programme of moving image from twelve artists who have each been awarded the opportunity to show work on Big Screen Southend throughout the year. The artists include Ryan Christopher, Diane Edwards, Helga Fannon, Helen Anna Flanagan, Katharine Fry, Matthew de Kersaint Giraudeau, Sophie Gresswell, Dan Guthrie, Maud Haya-Baviera, Bob Bicknell-Knight, Ruaidhri Ryan, Jessie Russell-Donn.

The first screening programme will include works by Ryan Christopher, Dan Guthrie, Sophie Gresswell, Maud Haya-Bavaria, Helen Ann Flanagan and Katharine Fry.

Screened daily on Big Screen Southend from 19 May to 29 August 2021, the works will be shown alongside the forthcoming exhibition ‘Practice Makes Perfect’ by Rosa-Johan Uddoh which launches with a day long opening on Saturday 22 May.

Ryan Christopher, Creole Garden, 2021

‘The Creole Garden is an assemblage of video Haikus where fleeting meditations on Creoleness, Theology and sanctuaries are carried through a stream of consciousness-like mode of narration. Drawing on the lineage of Biblical poets, reflective film from the 1960-70s, and postcolonial thought from Martinique, the work explores the emancipatory potential of poetic knowledge and communion. The haikus were made in collaboration with the London-based composer Tara Jerome, and the Amsterdam-based dancer Djenna Saccoh, with poems read by Laure Largent and Orphee Kashala.

Sophie Gresswell, Where are you from? 2020

A personal search for identity via the British staple of tea and biscuits. A young woman of mixed heritage struggles to answer the inevitable question: Where are you from?
Writer/Artist: Sophie Gresswell, Director: Lawrence Essex

Dan Guthrie, albion, refreshed, 2019

Can traditional British iconography be used to represent a modern multicultural nation that has been shaped and redefined by immigration? Dan Guthrie brings together a montage of Ankara fabrics printed in the colours of the Union Jack, a found poem constructed from the Wikipedia page for the Union Jack, footage shot around the tourist hotspots of Margate Beach and central London and an ominously reworked version of Rule Britannia to create a bold and striking audio-visual statement.

Helen Ann Flanagan, Gestures of Collapse, 2019

Gestures of Collapse is a short film inspired by a news story of alleged Coca Cola poisoning involving a number of high schools in Belgium in the 1990s. After an investigation, the epidemic was recognised as a large case of mass sociogenic illness (MSI): ‘a constellation of symptoms of an organic disease, without identifiable cause, which occurs between two or more people who share beliefs related to those symptoms.’ Gestures of Collapse uses the television news format to reveal the ways in which contagion, rumours, beliefs, emotions, and actions spread. The work reflects on human action, the mimetic unconscious and the ways in which behaviours are predicted, influenced, reproduced and manipulated.

Maud Haya-Baviera, Kinder, 2019

In 2019, while undertaking an artist residency in the Ruhr region, Haya-Baviera met nine children newly arrived in Germany. Together, they made Kinder, a video work in which the children poignantly share their thoughts and feelings about their young lives.

Katharine Fry, A Deal With God, 2020

‘A deal with god’ traces the progress and retreat of illness across Fry’s frail body, shot weeks after her discharge from hospital with Covid-19. Fry draws on the history of flowers as a metaphor for illness, from the depiction of Victorian women wracked with tuberculosis as fragile ‘fading flowers,’ to the surreal world of Boris Vian’s L’Ecume des Jours whose heroine develops a water lily on her lung and must be surrounded by flowers to heal while her home shrinks and decays. Fry makes manifest the unseen progress of infection through a sequence of flowers and a soundtrack of deteriorating breaths while a morphing blue hospital background simultaneously reflects her weakening lungs and the hallucinatory effects of isolation.

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