Monday 23 August 2021

AVANT KINEMA at SHANDY HALL

PRESS RELEASE August 2021

This weekend sees the launch of Imprints: Art Editing Modernism, an exhibition of art inspired by works of Modernist literature. The exhibition, which runs from Saturday 28th August to Saturday 11th September 2021 at the Shandy Hall gallery in Coxwold Yorkshire, is presented by Glasgow University's Imprints of the New Modernist Editing project in conjunction with The Laurence Sterne Trust. 

Scottish Borders based interdisciplinary artists, Avant Kinema - Sarahjane Swan and Roger Simian - were first commissioned by Imprints in 2019 to create a work for the exhibition inspired by the French Symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé's difficult final poem, A Throw of the Dice Never Will Abolish Chance (Un coup de dés jamais n'abolira le hasard, 1897).

Swan and Simian's finished piece, Every Thought Generates a Throw of the Dice, is an ambitious work comprising of multiple forms, including: film, an art book, sculpture, prints, photography, poetry and a deck of tarot style cards based on "twelve virgin symbols" extracted from Mallarmé's poem.

The exhibition "includes work in a variety of media, including paintings, drawing, sound works, digital prints, letterpress, silkscreen and engravings, sculpture, collage, and artists’ books, responding to texts from a range of different languages and cultures". It was originally scheduled to take place in the summer of 2020 but was postponed because of the Covid-19 pandemic.

What this unexpected throw of the dice did do, in the case of Avant Kinema, was to allow them an extra year in the company of Mallarmé and his work.

"We've always loved the French Symbolist poets," says Roger, "mainly because of their influence on Patti Smith and other rock lyricists, but neither of us was all that familiar with Stéphane Mallarmé. We'd never even heard of Un coup de dés until this commission came up."

"We soon grew to love him and his work, though," continues Sarahjane. "The lockdowns allowed us time to do that indepth. Un coup de dés is amazing when you delve into it, a typographical experiment, totally groundbreaking for its time, one of the earliest free form poems."

"Yes," adds Roger. "It's widely seen as a big influence on the early 20th century Modernist art movements, including DADA and Surrealism, concrete poetry, the look of manifestos from the Futurists to the Vorticists, so it immediately seemed familiar to us."

"In a lot of ways Un coup de dés is as much about visual imagery, rhythm and musicality as it is about the words," says Sarahjane, "so it seemed natural to us to take an interdisciplinary approach to trying to interpret it. One of the more unusual things I've done for this project is to create a mobile sculpture and eleven still images using shells and feathers in place of words, strictly following the sizing, word count and lay-out of Mallarmé's poem. Roger has written new poems, as well as producing a new literary translation of Un coup de dés, and we've worked together on film, sound and music, prints, playing cards and publications to try and capture the essence of the original."

Roger: "Every Thought Generates a Throw of the Dice is our attempt to translate the "untranslatable"."

Sarahjane: "This is very much an original work really but hugely influenced by Mallarmé's poem. We both think he would approve."

As well as working on the Imprints of the New Modernist Editing commission throughout 2020 into 2021, the duo have been busy with various other projects, including inventing a fictional 21st century art movement, oobROY, which included its own "Smashed Glass Manifestos". A PDF version is available on the website of Brighton based arts collective Exploding Appendix.

















Sunday 5 January 2020

Avant Kinema - 2020 Visions


2019 was an exceptional year for Avant Kinema's Sarahjane Swan & Roger Simian with film screenings in Glasgow, Edinburgh, London, Croatia, Sweden (Västerås), the USA (Florida), Brazil (Porto Alegre & Florianopolis), Australia (North Bellarine) and Italy (Foggia) as well as broadcasts across several US states as part of the experimental cable show, Here Comes Everybody
The duo were awarded a grant for analogue filmmaking equipment by the Hope-Scott Trust and won the Pauline Fay Lazarus Prize for work using the human form for their hand-processed Super 8 film, Boy and the Sea, at the opening of the SSA + VAS: Open exhibition in Edinburgh.



Boy and the Sea is currently screening daily as part of this exhibition at the RSA, on the Mound, until the 30th of January, and can be seen around 12.30 each day in the Cutlog Moving Image room. 







2020 is already looking to be even more exceptional for Avant Kinema with the announcement that the duo's film, Alphonso's Jaw (which grew out of their 2016 installation of the same name at the Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival) will tour the world throughout the year as part of the TIME is Love screenings. The promotional poster for this 12th edition of TIME is Love - which has Universal Feelings: Myths & Conjunctions as its theme - features a still from Alphonso's Jaw.



TIME is Love was started in 2008 by African artist and curator, Kisito Assangni, as "an annual video art program on the theme of love in hard times... Conceptually diverse, emotionally incisive and visually inventive, the selected works transform the most familiar video art into an illuminating investigation of contemporary culture".  Each year Assangni handpicks artist-filmmakers from around the world to fill his programme. 








This year Avant Kinema continue their regular exploration of analogue filmmaking equipment and processes with a series of handcrafted, artisan films. 





















The first of these films, Flow State (influenced by Mihály Csíkszentmihályi's 1970s theory on the mental state of complete absorption in a creative or practical activity) features a cartridge of vintage Super 8 filmstock, each frame painstakingly scratched and coloured by Sarahjane Swan, resulting in a kind of "moving abstract painting" which plays in concord with the largely improvised experimental soundtrack. Here's the 60 second trailer for the film:-





Avant Kinema have also been commissioned by the New Modernist Editing Network, based at the university of Glasgow, to create an artwork in response to a text from the constellation of Modernist editions which the network has identified. For this project Swan and Simian have chosen to work on an interdisciplinary "translation"  of the French Symbolist poet, Stéphane Mallarmé's "untranslatable" final poem, A Roll of the Dice will Never Abolish Chance (or Un coup de dés jamais n'abolira le hasard). 





Avant Kinema's finished work - which should incorporate a mix of film, music, writing and photography - will be presented as part of the exhibition, Imprints of the New Modernist Editing, at Shandy Hall in Yorkshire, one-time home of Laurence Sterne, author of the 18th century novel, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. The exhibition runs from the 12th to 26th of July and features a workshop on the 13th of July on the relationship between text and non-verbal elements. 












 

Wednesday 2 October 2019

AVANT KINEMA - Upcoming Screenings


AVANT KINEMA - FILM SCREENINGS - August to December, 2019

AUGUST

Location: Glasgow
Festival / Venue: Hedera Felix / ROST
Programme: Mycelia (issue 2) & SisM (issue 1) Launch
Film: In The Dark I Sat (2012)
Dates & Times:
Thurs 29th Aug, 7pm start

SEPTEMBER

Location: Edinburgh, Scotland
Festival / Venue: Art Walk Porty: Portobello Promenade
Programme: Tracing The Tide,
Film: Boy and the Sea (silent, 2019)
Dates & Times: Sat 7th / Thurs 12th, 9-10.15pm
Status: World Premier

>>>

Location: London, England
Festival / Venue: Portobello Film Festival, Westbank
Programme: Anne Pigalle & Art Films
Film: Ghost Worlds (Animal Rites) (2019)
Dates & Times: Thurs 12th, 6-10pm
Status: World Premier


>>>

Location: Split, Croatia
Festival / Venue: Kino Klub Split
Programme: All Female Evening / Powered by Agitate:21C
Film: Alphonso's Jaw (2016)
Dates & Times: Fri 20th Sept, starting 7.15pm

OCTOBER

Location: Sweden
Festival / Venue: Västerås Film Festival
Programme: 1-Min
Film: Boy and the Sea (60 secs, 2019)
Dates & Times:
Sat 12th October, starting 4.30pm


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Location: USA
Festival / Venue: Connect: International Videoarts Festival, University of Tampa, Florida
Programme: Film, Animation and New Media department
Film: Atrocity (2014)
Dates & Times:
23rd October, 6-9pm


NOVEMBER

Location: Brazil
Festival / Venue: International Panorama: Pinacoteca Ruben Berta Museum, Porto Alegre, Brazil
Programme: Videoart and Experimental Cinema volume 2
Film: Boy and the Sea (2019)
Dates & Times:
7th November, 7pm.


>>>

Location: Edinburgh
Festival / Venue: Edinburgh Short Film Festival, Summerhall
Programme: Conventionality Isn't Me
Film: Boy and the Sea (2019)
Dates & Times:
9th Nov, 7.30pm

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Location: Australia
Festival / Venue: North Bellarine Film Festival
Programme: Film & Video Art / Blast From The Past
Film: Ghost Worlds (10 mins, 2019) / Superfly Super 8 circa 1977 (2016)
Dates & Times:
Festival runs 15th to 17th November


>>>

Location: Italy
Festival / Venue: In Absentia Digital Pavilion, Cineporto di Foggia - Apulia Film Commission
Programme: Connect: International Videoarts Festival / Semiosphera / The Wrong
Film: Atrocity (2014)
Dates & Times:
22nd November 



>>>

Location: Brazil
Festival / Venue: International Panorama: O Sítio - Arte e Tecnologia, Florianopolis
Programme: Videoart and Experimental Cinema volume 2
Film: Boy and the Sea (2019)
Dates & Times:
26th November.



DECEMBER

Location: Edinburgh
Festival / Venue: Open: SSA + VAS at the RSA (Royal Scottish Academy)
Programme: CutLog - Artists Moving Image
Film: Boy and the Sea (2019)
Dates & Times:
Exhibition runs 22nd December to 30th January 2020

>>>

Location: Croatia
Festival / Venue: Kino Klub Split
Programme: Short(s) Petting - Powered by Agitate:21C Web Oriented Group
Film: Anna of my Seventy-Two Senses (2017)
Dates & Times:
Exhibition runs 27th December