cinema or gallery

 cinema or gallery- artist film makers between two pathways is a conversation about production processes, intentions, distribution channels, funding opportunities, support networks, luck and more for artists working with moving images. Speakers: Vivienne Dick, Jacqueline Holt, Cian Smyth, Nicholas Keogh, chaired by Daniel Jewesbury.
With 3 film projects in a row, one by young film-makers, one by a video artist and one by an animator, PS² started to wonder about the differences in approach, production process and professional development for the artists involved. All ‘films’ were shown in a gallery set up, but could they have been screened in a cinema as well? Or why not?
What defines a moving image as an artist film, installed in a gallery and what a ‘commercial’ film, shown in a cinema or TV? Is it down to opposites like autonomous/narrative, DIY/production team, low-/high budget? Or is it personal intention?
And what can or must be changed to make the professional path more diverse? VAI and PS² teamed up to highlight a diversity of professional developments in an ever expanding media form and analyse existing structures and shortcomings from training to funding to support-and distribution networks.

Free and everyone welcome. As the capacity is limited, please book a free place, see VAI.

Jacqueline Holt is an artist living in Belfast. In 2015, she co-founded AMINI (Artists Moving Image Northern Ireland) with fellow artist Michael Hanna. AMINI has two main aims. On a local level AMINI has been set up to support artists’ moving image practice within the region. We do this by organising screenings and events, and hosting the LUX Belfast Critical Forum, which meets each month at the MAC. In parallel to this, AMINI is focused on developing networks to promote artists’ moving image from the region, along with the wider diaspora of practice connected to Northern Ireland, on an international platform.
 

Cian Smyth has 20 years’ experience working in the arts and film sectors through festivals, the production of artworks to work in organisations such as NI Screen, the UK Film Council, European Commission, Arts Council of Northern Ireland, Cinema Arts Network, and The Space. During his career he has attracted over €1 million of investment by the EC into the local film and television industry and built a £5 million cultural programme for Northern Ireland and its involvement in London 2012. He is presently an Artistic Advisor to 1418 Now, Board Member of the Arts Council of Northern Ireland and the Chairperson of Outburst Arts.

Daniel Jewesbury is an artist, writer, editor and curator. He lectures in Film Studies at the University of Ulster and is himself an experimental filmmaker. Daniel is the curator of the 2016 TULCA Visual Arts Festival in Galway. He's also a researcher of Irish visual and material culture: current studies include explorations of the 'Half Proclamation' of 1916, FE McWilliam's sculpture 'Woman in a Bomb Blast', and the history of Belfast's first public artists, the Fitzpatrick Brothers. Daniel is currently working on a study of Belfast itself, to be published in early 2017.

Nicholas Keogh represented Northern Ireland at the Venice Biennale in 2005, represented the Republic of Ireland at Experience Pommery #5 L’art en Europe 2008. His film ‘A Removals Job’ 2012 commissioned by the MAC Belfast, received a Special Commendation at the Cork Film Festival, its screenings to date include the White Chapel Gallery, London and Encounters film festival Bristol, Union Docs New York and toured with FLAMIN in China and Japan. His 2015 film ‘introducing Brian’ has been included in the official selection of Rain dance London, London shorts film festival, best of Irish program Cork film festival.

Vivienne Dick has been making films and installations for thirty five years, though is best known for a burst of work in NYC in the late 70’s and early 80’s when she was part of what has become known as the No Wave scene. Together with an unruly cast of artists and musicians (notably Pat Place and Lydia Lunch) Dick helped create a vortex of nihilistic glamour that sustains the East Village to this day. Dick’s films, which often display a fractured narrative, stops and starts, off camera voices and rough cut production qualities, are suffused with personality, intimacy and political strength.These early works including Guérillère Talks (1978), She Had Her Gun All Ready (1978) and Liberty’s Booty (1980) are regularly shown in international museums as exemplars of an era when a tough aesthetic was probably the only option available.  Having returned to Ireland in the 80‘s she continued to create films that somehow refused - and indeed continue to refuse - to comply with the rules, despite displaying a serenity that only superficially offers thematic resolution. Indeed meanings and narrative in Dick’s work (A Skinny Little Man Attacked Daddy (1994), Excluded By The Nature Of Things (2002) and Trisha's Song (2009)) continue to elude like smoke in the hand. Vivienne Dick very kindly offered us a preview of her latest work The Irreducible Difference Of The Other (2013) and the time to discuss her work. 

This project is kindly supported by Visual Artists Ireland.