Launch of MIRAJ Special Issue: “Artists’ Moving Image, Isolation and Covid-19”
Covid-19 has impacted all aspects of our lives and is affecting the visual arts community, including artists working with the moving image in numerous ways. This fast-changing and uncertain situation brings with it questions about the short- and long-term impact on creative practice. Join us for the launch of a special issue of MIRAJ (Moving Image Review & Art Journal) that engages with the current crisis, providing testimonies to the experience of the past the year and imagining new strategies in a post pandemic world.
The launch will feature a rare screening of John Smith’s work COVID MESSAGES made under lockdown and a panel discussion including contributions from Patrick Campos (live from the Philippines), María Palacios Cruz, Aura Satz, Lindsay Seers, John Smith, Catherine Yass chaired by Michael Mazière and Lucy Reynolds (MIRAJ co-editors).
In partnership with CREAM, University of Westminster
Patrick F. Campos is an associate professor at the University of the Philippines (UP) Film Institute. He is the author of The End of National Cinema: Filipino Film at the Turn of the Century (UP Press, 2016), editor of Pelikula: A Journal of Philippine Cinema, and programmer of Tingin Southeast Asian Film Festival in Manila.
Michael Mazière is an artist and curator, currently reader in Film and Video at the University of Westminster. His practice encompasses the production of artworks, the curation of exhibitions, lecturing and writing about artists’ film and video. Mazière exhibits his films internationally, venues include the Tate, London and MOMA, New York and Videobrasil, São Paulo. He has curated artists’ film and video at the Whitechapel, Serpentine, ICA, National Film Theatre and internationally. He is the co-founder and curator of Ambika P3, an experimental research space for international contemporary art.
Aura Satz is a London-based artist whose work encompasses sound, film, performance and sculpture. Her work centres on the trope of ventriloquism in order to conceptualize a distributed, expanded and dialogical notion of voice. Satz has looked at various sound technologies in order to explore notation systems, code and encryption, and ways in which these might resist standardization, generating new soundscapes, and in turn new forms of listening and attending to the other. She has performed, exhibited and screened her work nationally and internationally, including Tate Modern, Tate Britain, BFI Southbank, the New York Film Festival, Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Hayward Gallery, Sydney Biennale 2016, NTT InterCommunication Center, Tokyo, High Line Art, the Rotterdam Film Festival, MoMA NY, and Sharjah Art Foundation. She has presented solo exhibitions at the Wellcome Collection, London; the Hayward Gallery project space, London; John Hansard Gallery, Southampton; Dallas Contemporary, Texas; George Eastman Museum, Rochester among others. Satz currently teaches at the Royal College of Art in London (https://www.iamanagram.com/; https://lux.org.uk/artist/aura-satz).
Lucy Reynolds makes art and writes about feminism, political space, moving image and collective practice. As an artist, her films and installations have been presented in galleries and cinemas internationally, and her ongoing sound work A Feminist Chorus has been heard at the Glasgow International Festival, the Wysing Arts Centre, the Showroom and The Grand Action cinema, Paris. She co-ordinates the Ph.D. programme for the Centre for Research in Education, Art and Media (CREAM) at the University of Westminster, and runs the MRES in Creative Practice. She is editor of the anthology Women Artists, Feminism and the Moving Image, and co-editor of the Moving Image Review and Art Journal (MIRAJ).
Lindsay Seers works in London and lives on the Isle of Sheppey. She studied at the Slade School of Fine Art (BA) and at Goldsmiths College (MA). She is represented by Matt’s Gallery. Her works are in the Tate Collection, Artangel Collection, Arts Council Collection and several private collections. She won the Derek Jarman Award and has been the recipient of a number of other grants, residencies and prizes.
John Smith, artist and lecturer. Born in Walthamstow, east London in 1952, Smith studied film at the Royal College of Art. He was inspired in his formative years by conceptual art and structural film, while also being fascinated by the immersive power of narrative and the spoken word. Since 1972 Smith has made over forty film, video and installation works that have been shown internationally in galleries, cinemas and on television. Often rooted in everyday life, Smith’s meticulously crafted films rework and transform reality, playfully exploring and exposing the language of cinema by subverting the perceived boundaries between documentary and fiction, representation and abstraction.
Catherine Yass (born in London, United Kingdom, 1963) lives and works in London and trained at the Slade School of Art, London; the Hochschüle der Künst, Berlin; and Goldsmiths College, London. Solo exhibitions and screenings include Aeolian Piano at RIBA (2018); Lighthouse at Alison Jacques Gallery, London (2012); a mid- career retrospective at De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill-on-Sea (2011); Flight, The Phillips Collections, Washington D.C.; The China Series, Stedelijk-Hertogenbosch Museum, The Netherlands (2009); and Descent, St Louis Art Museum, St Louis, MO (2009). In 2002, Yass was shortlisted for The Turner Prize. She also repre- sented the United Kingdom at the 10th Indian Triennial, 2001, and won the Glenn Dimplex Photography prize in 1999.