On 6 June CIRCUIT will renew its partnership with the Aperture Asia Pacific Film Festival in London to present Renewal, a screening of 6 works examining loss, memory and traces. Featuring work by Aliyah Winter, Marie Shannon, Lisa Reihana, Rachel Shearer, Gray Nicol, Gavin Hipkins. The screening will take place at CLOSE-UP—see the website for details on ticketing.
List of works
1) Aliyah Winter, Eli Jenkins' prayer (2016)
"The material from this work is lifted from a personal archive of musical recordings of the artist’s late grandfather, who was a prolific tenor. This work plays with a form of “drag”, both visually and temporally, to embody the existence and continuity of queerness through time and space."—Aliyah Winter
2) Marie Shannon, What I am Looking at (2011)
What I Am Looking At takes its title from Julian Dashper’s 1993 work, What I Am Reading at the Moment—a library chair with a pile of every issue of Art Forum to 1993. The video uses rolling text with simultaneous voiceover to describe the contents of an artist’s studio and the work that needs to be done to make sense and create order once the artist is no longer there. The text describes categories and lists of objects: the precious, the mundane and the baffling.
3) Gavin Hipkins, New Age (2016)
One of three films in a trilogy which navigate mythologised sites as their starting point for a reappraisal of genre and representation of these historic places. New Age explores the ritual landscape of Avebury’s stone circles by calling on passages from an English spiritualist manual from the 1870s and connotes spirit photography through recent snapshots.
4) Rachel Shearer, I am an open window (2016)
“Beginning in high saturation, I am an open window explores various amplifications of sensation; day passes to night, clouds hang in the sky like unexplained portents, nature brims with potential. A shudder of film in the gate subtly intimates the slippage between one state to another.”—Solomon Nagler
5) Gray Nicol, Remember Snow (2009)
Remember Snow began from memory, after Nicol carved a bust of a childhood acquaintance. “Snow was my mothers friend for some years. They didn't marry, and he moved on, sadly. I know very little about his life before and after that time. I have only one photograph, and you can't see his face.”—Gray Nicol
6) Lisa Reihana, Tai Whetuki House of Death (2015)
"Tai Whetuki is a video work by Lisa Reihana (Ngapuhi, Ngāti Hine and Ngai Tu) which delves into Māori and Pacific cultural practices pertaining to death and mourning. Haunting and evocative images, accompanied by an elemental soundscape take us on a journey through the intensity and spectacle of communal mourning, in a reflection on grief and the transition of the spirit."—Auckland Arts Festival
