Chronic Epoch
1995-2005
14 September – 20 November 2005
Wednesday – Sunday 12-6pm
Performances, Talks and Events
Monkey Diner
Hayley Newman and David Crawforth
Saturday 17 September, 12-6pm, arch
Hayley Newman and David Crawforth are reunited following their collaborative work, Rude Mechanic (Beaconsfield, 1996). In a modern British restaurant setting, two monkeys will prepare and serve spicey soup (£2) and banana splits (£1).
Vs.
Dafna Talmor and Joe Walsh
Sunday 18 September, 2pm, lower space
Free talk and screening, lower space. Dafna Talmor and Joe Walsh have invited selected artists who work closely with film and video to have a show-down with their favourite film scenes.
Featuring:
- Michael Curran and Louisa Minkin: Nightwatchman, Roll it back!
- Margarita Gluzburg: iconic scenes
- Francis Summers: the action performance of Charlemagne Palestine vs. the martial action of Steven Seagal
- Dafna Talmor: Cassavetes — actor vs. director
- Joe Walsh: “The Three Times I Met Linda Manz”
- Jonathan Whitehall: on Marguerite Duras
- Nicola Woodham: mystical guides and unplanned journeys in Powell and Pressburger’s films
The screening aims to be somewhere between a village film club and a university lecture with presentations from individuals known by Dafna and Joe to have an interesting angle on film and filmmakers.
Screening
Matt Hale
Saturday 24 September, 2pm, lower space
Simple tasks, everyday locations, universal human preoccupations. A selection of Matt Hale’s video works made over the last seven years. The artist will be available to answer questions.
Either Hale’s work falls short of our cultural expectations of art, or he is sturdily refusing to exploit the cultural capital of art for his own gains. Under such circumstances, there is a politics of cultural authority. Hollywood attention-seeking, celebrity-filled special effects blockbusters are at one end of the political spectrum while Hale’s simple tasks are at the other.
Dave Beech 2003.
List of works:
- Balancing act 2005
- Water under the bridge [flood] 2004
- Kick the bucket [rural] 2002
- Hook 2005
- Heart 2004
- Plug’ole 2005
- A bit of slap and tickle [speedy]
Birdsong DJ
Bob and Roberta Smith
Sunday 25 September, 2pm, arch
Bob and Roberta Smith create a soundscape using wildlife recordings found at boot fairs.
Ten Years x 7
Mark Dean
Sunday 2 October, 2pm, lower space
(Five Years x 50% + Superstition x 70% + Thirteen Years x 130% + She’s Nineteen x 190% + 21st Independence x 210% + One Hundred Years From Now x 1000% + 400 Years x 4000%)
Mark Dean’s Ten Years x 7 takes as its source seven records, each one referencing a number of years (from David Bowie’s Five Years to Bob Marley’s 400 Years). These recordings have then been time-stretched to a relative duration of ten years apiece (eg Five Years slowed to 50%, 400 Years speeded to 4000%) The result is a durational projection lasting one side of an LP, or a lifetime.
Improvisation
Bruce Gilbert
Sunday 2 October, 2pm, arch
An improvisation using analogue and digital sound-modifying devices. Parts of the performance will be dependent on the physical and acoustic qualities of the performing area. Be warned some of the sounds may be of an extreme or loud nature.
Scissors, paper, steel
Tamsin Pender
Wednesday 5 Sunday 9 October, 12-6pm, yard
In 1998 Tamsin Pender was invited to feminise the balcony in the upper gallery with stitch. Since, she has made various lo-fi forays into the great outdoors. For Chronic Epoch we’ve asked her back to transform the galvanised steel gates in the backyard. She will be getting to grips with this industrial structure 5-9 October and the work will remain until the end of Chronic Epoch.
Living History
Kim Noble
Saturday 8 Sunday 9 October, 12-6pm, upper space
Kim Noble is: Gaius Cornelius, John of Gaunt, Corporal G. Smithers and Alexander Fleming. This week: The Peasant’s Revolt of 1381.
Down in the Cellar
Aaron Williamson
Saturday 8 October, 2-6pm, arch
Down in the cellar, beneath a queasy subterranean light, a mutant form peels and dresses himself for fear. Held by his reflection in an overhanging mirror he shifts and changes, trying new guises in the polished glass. There are tasks to fit in between changing — bogeyman tasks.
UBER GENETALIS (mother of thousands)
presented by Bruce Gilchrist
Wednesday 12 October Sunday 16 October, 12-6pm, arch
Mother of Thousands is a term from plant biology, signifying production of new “offspring” directly from buds.
Using fresh fruit and vegetables connected to a series of galvanometers and a mixing desk, the expression of “life force” is reduced to a cocophony of unravelling mobile ring tones, the soundscapes of crap computer games and fucked electronic toys.
Screening
selected by Melanie Keen
Sunday 16 October, 2pm, lower space
Handsworth Songs(1986), directed by John Akomfrah, was the first major documentary film of the Black Audio Film Collective. It examines the origins of the uprisings by black communities in Handsworth, Birmingham in 1985 through archival material and interviews. Its themes are race, memory, ideology and Britain’s colonial past. It seems poignant, within the context of Chronic Epoch, that twenty years later those feelings of disenchantment should resonant with the same richness and complexity.
Visit Palestine and Israel Terror Bus
presented by Katie Barlow
Saturday 22 October, 2pm, lower space
In 2004, Katie Barlow exhibited a video installation as part of Beaconsfield’s Engineer exhibition. Her work comprised footage collected over three years of filming in the Palestinian Occupied Territories. She then went on to use this footage to make the feature documentary, Visit Palestine, described by John Pilger as, “An astonishing piece of work, a wonderful film, quite unlike anything I have seen”. On 22 October 2005, she will be presenting the film, alongside a documentary she produced for the BBC, Israel’s Terror Bus. These films give radically contrasting perspectives on the conflict. Katie Barlow will be present to answer questions and discuss the differences between the two films and her experiences making them.
Performance
Ian Hinchcliffe
Sunday 23 October, 2pm, arch
Maverick performance veteran Ian Hincliffe prefigures a generation of artists who have rejected high art in preference for a DIY or trash aesthetic.
Trainstallation Ver1.1
presented by Richard Dedominici
Friday 28 Sunday 30 October, 12-6pm, arch
Richard Dedomenici will be installed on top of the wooden stage in Beaconsfield’s railway arch and using National Rail Enquiries, some mirrors, and a wooden train set will attempt to interpret the rumblings coming through the ceiling into meaningful real-time data in order to predict where the trains passing overhead are going. Come and join him for a cup of tea.
rights repeated
Monica Ross
Saturday 5 November, 2pm, arch
rights repeated is devised to take place within the split level of Hayley Newman’s stage design in the arch space at Beaconsfield. The work centres on the act of committing to memory the Universal Declaration of Human Rights 1948.
From Parallel Cinema to Necrorealism: St Petersburg radical aesthetic experiment in film and video
Anya Stonelake
Saturday 5 November, 3pm, lower space
Films by Alexandr Anikeenko, Boris Kazakov, Evgeniy Kondratev (Debil), Evgeniy Yufit. The programme will include a vodka break and an introduction by Anya Stonelake.
Recent Works
Zineb Sedira
Sunday 6 November, 2pm, lower space
Zineb Sedira will be in conversation with Edith Marie Pasquier about issues of perception and representation in relation to a group of recent video works (some in progress) including On a summers day, The Port of Algiers, and And the road goes on.
FLUTTER
[rout]
Saturday 12 November, 2pm, arch
[rout] feat. ButterflyCut
David Arrowsmith – electric guitar, Tom Hall – laptop, Sam Hayden – laptop, Richard Pryce – double-bass, Paul Whitty – samplers and mini-disc players.
classic experimental work by James Tenney and La Monte Young is performed alongside first performances of new work by [rout] founder members Sam Hayden and Paul Whitty. Sam Hayden collaborates with Tom Hall in laptop duo butterflyCut while Paul Whitty mixes live feeds and found sounds with electric guitar and double bass. the eclectic brew is completed by Paul Newland’s video work no[w]here.
In-Flight Entertainment
selected by Eric Rosoman
Sunday 13 November, 2pm, lower space
Leonardo da Vinci to Buzz Lightyear, we have always dreamt of conquering gravity. In-Flight Entertainment compiles flights of fancy by Chris Cornish, Eric Rosoman, Pernille Spence, Peter Rose and a new work by Nikolaj Bendix Skyun Larsen, interspersed with excerpts of documentary footage.
The Space Between (2x16mm film loops, live sound, 2005)
David Cunningham/Brad Butler/Karen Mirza
Friday 18 November, 6pm, arch
The Space Between is an open structure based on a relatively small set of input materials. The live sound (generated from a single electric guitar) uses a series of simultaneous delays to create spatially separated long repeating loops and very short delays. The harmonic input is restricted – all complexity arises from the overlapping delays, a parallel structure which mirrors or coexists with the multiple time bases of the repeating film loops and the multi-screen edit/flicker.