Film London Jarman Award 2013

Tenant (extract from 78 min film) Grace Schwindt/2012/12mins In Tenant, the family home becomes the stage to re-enact a scripted dialogue that takes as a starting point a story about Mrs. Schumacher who was the lodger of the artist's grandfather in Berlin during the Second World War. She was a communist and helped Vladimir Lenin travel from Switzerland to Russia in 1917 after the February Revolution broke out. The relationship between language and physical movements explores roles that these two elements play in the creation of knowledge and social relations. Tenant was commissioned by FLAMIN Productions and co-produced by City Projects with support from Collective.

M20 Death Drives (documentation) Emma Hart/2012/12mins Wing mirrors reflect a concealed television playing a video describing a near fatal motorway crash. Each mirror provides a different viewpoint onto the single screen video which has been edited to transform into a weird puppet show retelling the fractured story. Horrific details from the car accident bang into the terror and events caused by driving down the same stretch of road twenty years later to make the video. Protruding catering trays become service stations, serving up products from the traumatised places the video slips down to when it breaks in the various M20 service stations. This is edited video documentation of a sculpture commissioned by the Whitstable Biennale 2012.

Pageant Roll Jessica Warboys/2012/9mins The starting point for many of Warboys’ works is often an historical figure or place. In the past these have ranged from the medieval poet Marie de France to the little-known dancer Héléne Vanel, briefly associated with the Surrealists, to the Forest of Fontainebleau in France and East London’s Victoria Park. These become tangible spaces to project and animate the unexpected. Pageant Roll can both allude to early British Modernism’s preoccupation with the power of landscape and mysticism or to a subtle feline presence, the tale or tail of a cat. Geometric assembled objects such as hula hoops bent into ellipses and squares in the form of monochrome paintings, are placed in the landscape whilst shots of Cornish standing stones are collaged with painted eggs in milk. Warboys’ distinctive visual language and use of sound are woven together to create psychological spaces. In Pageant Roll, this sense is heightened by an intermittent and ethereal soundtrack the film loop plays forwards and backwards, creating the illusion of a circular narrative. (Camera: Ville Piippo; Assistant: Ieva Kabašinskaite; Sound: Morten Norbye Halvorsen.) Commissioned by Documenta (13).

Dad's Stick John Smith/2012/5mins “Dad’s Stick features three well-used objects that my father showed me shortly before he died. Two of these were so steeped in history that their original forms and functions were almost completely obscured. The third object seemed to be instantly recognizable, but it turned out to be something else entirely.” Dad's Stick was commissioned by the Frieze Foundation for Frieze Film.

:-* (single-screen version of an installation) Charlotte Prodger/2012/11mins “In making :-* I turned to the endless content of internet video as source material. An anonymous YouTube user posts domestic videos through the username Nikeclassics, documenting various acts of adoration and destruction to his pristine collection of trainers. His videos can be read as a desire to see every part of the object - a fetishism opposing part to whole. My previous works in 16mm film had been exploring ideas in parallel to those I'd seen in these YouTube videos: the process of measuring, cutting, aesthetics; of visual and material pleasure. To make :-* I ripped two of Nikeclassics's YouTube videos and showed them, unedited, on two Hantarex video monitors. The spoken-word sound played unsynched on a Sharp GF777 boombox. I employ playback devices (such as boomboxes) and my peers, as multiple ciphers for my writing. I do this to look at speech, and the self for which it is a conduit, as it transmutates through time, space, bodies and technological systems. These narrative fragments shift between tenses and persons just as the edgelessness of internet video can be experienced everywhere simultaneously.”

Yellow Limbo & Anatopism (single screen edit of installation work comprising video and slide projection) Uriel Orlow/2011/13min The starting point of Yellow Limbo is an extraordinary episode that has all but disappeared from official histories; namely, the failed passage of fourteen international cargo ships through the Suez Canal on 5 June 1967. Caught in the outbreak of the so-called Six-Day Arab-Israeli War, the ships were only able to leave the canal in 1975 when it re-opened. While stranded for eight years in the Great Bitterlake, the cold- war political allegiances of the multi-national crews were dissolved and gave way to a form of communal survival and the establishment of a social system. This involved the organisation of their own Olympic games in 1968, amongst other activities. Foregrounding the material history of its images, Yellow Limbo interleaves vintage slides and 8mm film shot by crew members with the artist's own recent HD footage on location and is combined with the text-piece Anatopism – a time-capsule of events of particular relevance, general importance or personal interest from the eight years of the ships' confinement. This three-way comparison of events, disembodied from the timeline of experience, creates a complication of concurrence, consequence and dissociation, giving rise to a sense that time is pleated, causality radiating and that this rippling expanse of saltwater somehow communicates diagonally through time. Supported by Pro Helvetia, Arts Council England and Contemporary Image Collective Cairo.

Osculator (Radio Edit) (remixable HD video loop) Hannah Sawtell/2011-13/5mins Osculator utilizes a taken/borrowed and then adapted, YouTube advertising video for a mining truck manufacturer; a Final Cut Pro X water effect; two online purchased, animated, clothed and altered 3d wireframe’s (a monster truck and the Apple Store entrance way in Pudong China); an online sourced and reworked mp3 industrial sound file. First shown as an installation at the ICA, London in 2012, the original video loop ran continuously during the exhibition and was back projected onto a cinema size screen. Opposite this screen was a 20 ft bespoke acoustic parabola receptor. The installation architecture forced the digital sound to become physically dense in the centre of the space. The viewer could also walk behind the video screen accessing the back of the image. Osculator, as an installation, was a space where the source of extraction of raw materials used in communication devices, the production, distribution and group reception of sound and image and the labor congealed within these objects, was placed to the fore. Osculator intends to explore the physical, cognitive and virtual dimensions of surplus capital and its global accumulation/valorization. It pairs the language of advertising and new technologies of excess and access, within the realm of self-perpetuating eternal return. Hannah Sawtell has worked with video, digital image, sculptural installation, printed matter, industrial design, performance and noise. Her works have proposed the ‘screen as a lens’ and a deceleration by employing repetitive editorial rhythm.

The Lion and The Unicorn Rachel Maclean/2012/12mins The Lion and The Unicorn is a short film inspired by the heraldic symbols found on the Royal Coat of Arms of The United Kingdom, the lion (representing England) and the unicorn (representing Scotland). The film uses these representations of both alliance and opposition to explore the myriad, convoluted and often contradictory constructions of cultural identity that make up the unstable definitions of what it means to be Scottish or part of the Union with England. The video features three recurrent characters: the lion, the unicorn and the queen. These figures seem to emerge from disparate genres, including shadowy historical reconstruction, playful nursery rhyme and pragmatic TV interview. Inhabiting the rich historical setting of Traquair House in the Scottish Borders, they are seen drinking North-sea oil from Jacobite crystal, dividing up the pieces of a Union Jack cake and inciting conflict over the mispronunciation of Robert Burns. Commissioned by The Edinburgh Printmakers for Year of Creative Scotland 2012.

The Tiger's Mind (extract from 23 min film) Beatrice Gibson/2012/10mins The Tiger's Mind is an abstract thriller set against the backdrop of a Brutalist villa. Six characters; The Tiger, The Mind, The Tree, Wind, The Circle and a girl called Amy (the film's set, music, sounds, special effects, camera and narrator respectively) battle one another for control of the film as it unfolds on screen. The film explores the relationships between these characters as they emerge and unfold: echoing, caressing, perplexing, grappling, wrestling and dreaming with one another. A portrait of its own making, The Tiger's Mind relocates narrative and character to the production structure itself, dramatizing and re- staging it for film. Tiger's props, Mind's music, Wind's effects, Tree's sounds, and Circle's camera all knock up against each other in a battle for primacy. The Tiger's Mind is based on a musical score of the same name written in 1967 by the radical British composer Cornelius Cardew. Generated by a publishing project initiated by Will Holder and Beatrice Gibson in 2010, that deployed the score as means for producing speech, the film features Alex Waterman as the Tree, Celine Condorelli as the Circle, John Tilbury as the Mind, Jesse Ash as the Wind, Holder as Amy, and Gibson as the Circle and is accompanied by a publication, edited by Holder. Co-commissioned by The Showroom and CAC Brétigny, produced in partnership with Index - The Swedish Contemporary Art Foundation, Stockholm and funded by Fluxus, Franco-British Fund for Contemporary Art, Arts Council England, Outset Contemporary Art Fund (as The Showroom’s Production Partner 2012) The Showroom Supporters Scheme, Index - The Swedish Contemporary Art Foundation, Stockholm and CAC Brétigny.

Warm, Warm, Warm Spring Mouths Ed Atkins/2013/13mins “Warm, Warm, Warm Spring Mouths takes place in some kind of unliveable situation; somewhere airless between data and a deep-sea trench. A place where human life is impossible but nevertheless persists, in some revenant form between memory and hefty immutability. I suppose I wanted to conspicuously address performance with this work: performance at its cogent limit. The performance of grief, of love, sexuality (being a sort of convoluted, aphoristic, vernacular poetry). A world of apparently un-performable truths. I want to obviate the 'truth' of these sorts of affections through some sublime slice of artifice. I want glamour, virtuosity, narcissism, baroque; to speak in paradoxes of heart-rending flat depth.” Commissioned by Jerwood Visual Arts and Film and Video Umbrella for the Jerwood/Film and Video Umbrella Awards. With support from Arts Council England.

The Jarman Award is presented by:

Touring programme presented with thanks to: