MattFlix
Mania Akbari & Douglas White, Lubion, Until 5.59pm 23 April 2021
Mania Akbari and Douglas White, Lubion, 2019. Film still, courtesy the artists.
MattFlix presents Lubion (2019), a short film by Mania Akbari and Douglas White, screening for one month at mattflix.video.
Taking its title from the eponymous IVF hormone treatment undertaken by Akbari, Lubion journeys through a shifting psychological and corporeal terrain borne of the powerful effects of this process. The film layers intimate home footage with vibrant CG renderings of medical imagery, veering between the personal and the clinical. The result is a hallucinatory landscape, soundtracked by Shahin Entezami, in which reality mixes with a chimeric techno-natural vision of inner and outer worlds.
Lubion was originally commissioned by Modern Forms and is distributed by Cryptofiction.
Happy birthday, MattFlix! Archive now available to explore
MattFlix is one year old! To coincide with its anniversary we are delighted to make the growing archive of works available.
Over the last twelve months, we have brought you 21 online projects and screenings, each made available to view for a short time only.
To mark our first birthday we are delighted to present an archive of 15 previously screened works by: Paul Eachus & Nooshin Farhid, Juan Cruz, Lindsay Seers & Keith Sargent, Nathaniel Mellors, Jordan Baseman, Jennet Thomas, Willie Doherty, Joey Holder, Janette Parris, Richie Moment, Bronwen Buckeridge, Tai Shani, Melanie Jackson, Sally O’Reilly, and Suzanne Treister.
With special thanks to all of the artists who have taken part so far and to you for watching.
Click here to explore the MattFlix Archive.
Artists’ News
Lucy Gunning, In Passing, PALFREY, 14 April – 1 May 2021
Lucy Gunning, installation view from In Passing, 2021. Courtesy of the artist and Matt’s Gallery, London.
Opening later this month is In Passing, a project by Lucy Gunning made for the space at PALFREY where she has made work intermittently over the past year. Gunning makes installations that juxtapose diverse material and spatial elements with what she calls a “prosaic relation to the performative”, such that their attendant actions are often integrated with their everyday surroundings. Working with moving image, objects, materials, surfaces, natural and artificial light, In Passing proceeds by inhabiting the space to explore the interplay of the building and the conditions of the time.
Several of Gunning’s ongoing concerns are brought together here: behaviour, interacting with public and private space; the planned and unplanned affordances of built spaces; the slowing down of consciousness; the intangibility and temporality of light and the qualities of the present moment. These lead to the development of a series of interventions in relation to the ‘whole’ space and the transient natural light which constitute In Passing.
Booking essential. Please click here to book your place at the opening on Wed 14 April, 3-8pm.
Mike Nelson, 13th Gwangju Biennale, Until 9 May 2021
View of Mike Nelson, Mirror reverb (the blinding of a building, a notation for another), 2018, Imagined Borders, 12th Gwangju Biennale, 2018. Courtesy of the artist and 303 Gallery, New York; Galleria Franco Noero, Turin; Matt’s Gallery, London; and neugerriemschneider, Berlin.
Alongside new commissions for the 13th Gwangju Biennale, Mike Nelson’s 2018 work Mirror reverb (the blinding of a building, a notation for another), originally created for the 12th Gwangju Biennale, will be restaged. Mirror reverb is a site-specific installation that reinterprets the physicality and internality of the former Armed Forces’ Gwangju Hospital church.
Melanie Jackson, Collaborative Works-in-Progress: Bawdy Medieval Badges, 13 April 2021, 6-7.15pm (BST)
Melanie Jackson, spekyng rybawdy, 2020. Courtesy of the artist and Matt’s Gallery, London.
Join Ann Marie Rasmussen and Melanie Jackson for an event that focuses on a work-in-progress on medieval badges, which are small, brooch-like objects from the High and late Middle Ages in Europe.
In this special event, University of Waterloo Professor Ann Marie Rasmussen, author of Medieval Badges: Their Wearers and Their Worlds (forthcoming, 2021), will be joined by multidisciplinary artist Melanie Jackson to discuss the world of bawdy medieval badges. This event will feature Melanie Jackson’s recent reimagining of these bawdy badges in her project, spekyng rybawdy, where she brings these infamous badges to new life. Their conversation will be moderated by Professor Steven Bednarski (History, St. Jerome’s University).
Medieval badges are small, brooch-like objects that were mass-produced in the High and late Middle Ages in Europe. Over 20,000 of these lead-tin alloy badges survive into our times. They feature image or symbols that were familiar to medieval people. Often referred to as pilgrim badges because so many surviving badges are religious, many medieval badges in fact belong to the secular sphere of life. Among these are over three hundred obscene badges whose iconography displays explicit, and at times puzzling, bawdy imagery and scenes.
The talk is free, click here to sign up via Eventbrite.
Lindsay Seers, Art Fictions podcast episode now available
Image courtesy of Lindsay Seers.
Guest artist Lindsay Seers joins Elizabeth Fullerton to chat about her work via Russell Hoban’s 1980 novel ‘Riddley Walker’. A child of sorts in a futurist, post-nuclear explosion setting which harks back to the iron age, far from walking, the narrator Riddley is on the run. His patriarchal heritage has deemed him ‘connexion man’ and alongside his role of puppeteer, interpreter and propaganda pusher, Riddley begins to uncover the truth of past cleverness which is officially prohibited under religious conjecture. He throws himself to the dogs and together they journey through danger and forbidden knowledge in a story held together by a fragmented new language.
Layering ideas and various time zones, Lindsay Seers and Elizabeth Fullerton explore imposter syndrome, hunger for power, problems with articulation, excess of language, confusion, the puppet who overwhelms the puppetmaster, the search for new forms of artwork, becoming a camera, character instability, non normative brains, compassion, discomfort, connections, coincidences, blips, misunderstandings, signs, traces, unknown causes, unknown effects, mass hallucination, states of becoming, constant evolution, multitude of narratives, grand historical narratives, personal history, quantum theory, quantum biology, metaphysics, unified consciousness, the impossibility of identifying origin, and eye gouging.
Click here to listen via PodBean, or wherever you usually get your podcasts.
Lindsay Seers & Keith Sargent, Care(less)², Recent awards success
Lindsay Seers, still from Care(less), 2019. Courtesy of the artist and Matt’s Gallery, London.
We are delighted to announce that Lindsay Seers and Keith Sargent’s recent work Care(less)² has been selected for the following awards:
Semi-finalist, Best Short film (Continental), Blackbird film festival, New York, USA. 2021
Official selection, Global lift-off festival extravaganza, Pinewood, London. 2021
Official selection, Human Rights Film Network, Dox: Prague, Czech Republic. 2021 (Physical Exhibition).
Official selection, Global lift-off festival, Berlin, Germany. 2021
Official selection, Anifilm, Liberec, Czech Republic. 2021
John Frankland, East London Climbing (and Sculpture Guide)
East London Climbing (and Sculpture) Guide. 39x54cm (13x18cm folded). Offset printed in London on Recycled Paper (135gsm). Photographer Michael Bodiam.
Creative platform Steep Learning Group have produced a double-sided foldable poster guide to the Shoreditch Park and Mabley Green boulders, both part of the sculpture project ‘Boulder’ by artist John Frankland. Including drawn topos and descriptions for 85 boulder problems, the story behind the boulders, as well as a new text by the artist and text by Ingrid Swenson, Director of PEER.
All proceeds of the poster go to Project One Climbing. Project One supports children who face cultural and financial barriers to climbing. The poster sales will enable the organisation to buy the equipment required to take local children to climb the boulder.
Click here to purchase the East London Climbing (and Sculpture) Guide.
Mike Nelson, Gravmonumenter, Kunsthal Aarhus, 21 April – 9 May 2021
David Robbins, HE MADE SOME GOOD POINTS, 2020
Mike Nelson will be participating in forthcoming group exhibition Gravmomumenter which opens on 21 April at Kunsthal Aarhus, Denmark.
“The question of artworks and grave monuments found in the public space of graveyards are seldom cause for discussion. There appears to be a certain reluctance to broach the subject even though it will inevitably become relevant to everyone at some point in life.
Accordingly, the exhibition Gravmonumenter (Eng. Grave Monuments) should simply be seen as a constructive contribution to an ongoing debate. The exhibition offers a range of inspirational takes on how we, as citizens and as a society, can incorporate contemporary art in more ways in public spaces and in everyday life in general – including in connection with deaths. There is no single ‘right’ way to experience art, but many. Works of art and monuments can be enjoyed and prompt reflection in museums, parks, hospitals, roundabouts – and graveyards, too”
Jacob Fabricius, Artistic Director of Kunsthal Aarhus
Nathaniel Mellors, new single Horrific Object out now
‘Horrific Object’ is a limited debut 7” single by Nathaniel Mellors (The God In Hackney, Skill 7 Stamina 12, Conemelt). 250 copies on split translucent blue / opaque pink vinyl. Released jointly by The Box Editions (Los Angeles) and Junior Aspirin Records (Hampshire, UK). Artwork by Tala Madani.
The track ‘Horrific Object’ fuses a swaggering jazz-blues pulse with a vocal narrative reminiscent of an early 20th-century horror short story (think: Arthur Machen on vibes). The song concerns a writer who is given the eponymous ‘horrific object’: a thing which is somehow encoded with a critique of the writer’s very existence – “all the air around you is infected”. The song takes aim at the presumptions of cultural ownership, inspired in part by “Exiting the Vampire Castle”, an essay on class and culture by the influential thinker Mark Fisher. ‘Horrific Object’ was originally written and recorded to accompany a sculpture of the same name which Mellors made for the 2020 Busan Biennale exhibition in South Korea.
The AA side, ‘Irrigating Hell’, is about another kind of horror – that of displacement. The song ruminates on a move to Los Angeles and combines imagery of ecological, car and career-based catastrophe with a more industrial and textured landscape reminiscent of Throbbing Gristle.
Includes unlimited streaming of Horrific Object via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more. Click here to buy.
Jordan Baseman & Suky Best, The Spiritual Exercises 2, Arts Chaplaincy Projects, online
Jordan Baseman & Suky Best, No Such Thing, 2021. Still from digital video. Courtesy of the artists, Matt’s Gallery, and Danielle Arnaud, London.
Jordan Baseman is showing video work No Such Thing, made collaboratively with artist Suky Best, as part of The Spiritual Exercises 2. This is the second iteration of the online exhibition organised by Arts Chaplaincy Projects, a partnership between University of the Arts London & the Diocese of London.
Mike Nelson & Rachel Lowe, The Spiritual Exercises 2, Arts Chaplaincy Projects, online
Image courtesy of Mike Nelson and 303 Gallery, New York; Galleria Franco Noero, Turin; Matt’s Gallery, London; and neugerriemschneider, Berlin.
Artists Mike Nelson & Rachel Lowe are also participating in The Spiritual Exercises 2. Click here to see their collaborative image-based contribution.
Image courtesy of Rachel Lowe and Narrative Projects, London.
New music video from Idmonster v Lindsay Seers (No more History)
Still from music video for Idmonster v Lindsay Seers (No more History)
We’re pleased to present the music video for a discordant new track from Idmonster v Lindsay Seers (No more History). Click here to watch in full.
Credits:
Lindsay Seers (voice + animation)
Keith Sargent (animation)
Pendle Poucher/Idmonster (music)
Melanie Jackson, RECIPES UNDER CONFINEMENT, 2021, Ed. Sharon Kivland
RECIPES UNDER CONFINEMENT, 2021 Edited by Sharon Kivland
RECIPES UNDER CONFINEMENT is a cookbook that follows a call on Facebook by the Editor to friends and acquaintances in 2020, a few months into confinement, asking for their recipes under confinement (at the same time as a friend called for dreams). Many people were showing or recounting what they were preparing, with pride in their resourcefulness, their invention, their modest ambition. She mentioned Alice B. Toklas’s cook book as an example, which is a mingling of recipe and reminiscence. Herein are recipes sent by hundred and fifteen cooks, who are also writers, poets, artists, art historians, editors, philologists, lovers, mothers, fathers, sons, daughters, brothers, and sisters (and of course, children and grandmothers and other kin. There are also several cats who did not provide recipes but interfered).
Featuring a contribution from Melanie Jackson, the recipes range from soup to nuts: from artichokes (planting of) to tea (brewing of), from smoking (fish, that is) to nettle soups (foraged); from pickles (various) to fermenting (tips and a kind offer). There are breads, cakes, muffins, scones, and puddings. Fridges are emptied, store cupboards exploited, and all are resourceful when resources are limited. And wonderfully, there is homebrewing, wine, and cocktails.
Profits from sales of this book will go to the Trussell Trust. Click here for a full list on contributors and to purchase a copy.
Michael Curran in conversation with Hari MacMillan, Available to watch now
Michael Curran, l’heure autosexuelle : video still 1994. Courtesy of the artist.
University of Atypical presents a recording of Hari MacMillan and Michael Curran in conversation live Zoom from Saturday 6 March 2021.
The University of Atypical was delighted to host I’M NOT NORMAL as part of the International Women’s Day 2021 programme. Responding to this year’s theme The New Phenomenal, artists Hari MacMillan and Michael Curran conversed on the impact their personal histories have had on their lives and art practice. Talking informally on Zoom, between Fife and Edinburgh during lockdown, they discuss mental health, identity, staying with the difficulty and the rewards of making work while sharing a wide range of videos and performances from their oeuvre.
Nicola Bealing & Matthew Krishanu, John Moores Painting Prize 2020, Online
Nicola Bealing, The Horse, 2019. Oil on linen, 118x76cm. Courtesy of the artist and Matt’s Gallery, London.
Artist Nicola Bealing and Matt’s Gallery Trustee Matthew Krishanu are exhibiting artists in the current iteration of the John Moores Painting Prize. On show is Bealing’s painting The Horse (2019), a work commissioned for her solo exhibition Three Acts and Seven Scenes which took place at Salisbury Art Centre in 2020. Also included is Krishanu’s 2020 Riverboat, a large-scale work on canvas.
This year’s paintings were chosen by jurors Hurvin Anderson, Alison Goldfrapp, Jennifer Higgie, Gu Wenda and Michelle Williams Gamaker.
Matthew Krishanu, Riverboat, 2020. Oil on canvas, 200×270 cm. Courtesy of the artist.
Lindsay Seers & Keith Sargent, D02.2, Plicnik Space Initiative, until 15 October 2021
Lindsay Seers & Keith Sargent, Anomaly 4, 2020. Still from video, duration 18:34. Courtesy of the artists and Matt’s Gallery.
As we transition into an online era, Plicnik Space Initiative proposes to test dissonances between physical and virtual spaces. Launched as an open call in June 2020, the project invited artists to propose works to be shown aboard the D02.2 spacecraft with the aim to test ways in which participants would interact with both illusionary spatial constraints and how they would respond to distinct spatial narratives.
For D02.2, Lindsay Seers and Keith Sargent present Anomaly 4. Anomaly 4 does not really want to be explained by an elucidating text; it wants to rest in the medium that shapes it. It does not follow a convention of story telling that governs theatre/cinema. What it does follow is a freewheeling set of associations and the vagaries of our interpretations of events. As a construct it wants to be like consciousness might really be … fragmented, discontinuous, oscillating, driven to constructing false cause and effect narratives from endless occurrences that ultimately have no clear singular causal relation.
Graham Fagen, New Symphony of Time, Mississippi Museum of Art, Mississippi, USA, Until September 2021
Graham Fagen, The Slave’s Lament, 2015, video still. Image courtesy of the artist and Matt’s Gallery, London.
New Symphony of Time expands the boundaries of Mississippi’s identity, casting light on a shared past to help reflect an expansive, more inclusive future. This ongoing exhibition features a single screen version of Graham Fagen’s, Slave’s Lament amongst other contemporary pieces such as Benny Andrews’ Mississippi River Bank and Jeffrey Gibson’s Sharecropper, pieced quilts, historical paintings, and self-taught artwork, which provide an alternate lens from which to consider the significant creative contributions of the state of Mississippi and its place as part of a broader, American narrative.
David Osbaldeston, The Serving Library Collection, 019 Gallery, Ghent
David Osbaldeston, The Variable: Translator, 2018. Half-tone digital print on Somerset paper, 102 x 71 cm. Photography by Michiel de Cleene. Courtesy of the artist and Matt’s Gallery, London.
David Osbaldeston’s work can be seen in a long term exhibition of The Serving Library Collection, which is on semi-permanent display at 019 Gallery, Ghent until late 2021.
A number of works by Osbaldeston will be shown in the collection, including Another Shadow Fight, a series of woodcuts from 2008 and more recently The Variable: Translator from his 2018 exhibition at Bonington Gallery. The collection houses over 100 works and objects, and includes artists Janice Kerbel, Ryan Gander, Frances Starck, Richard Hamilton, Chris Evans, Sanya Kantarovsky and many more. Click here for more information about The Serving Library Collection.
The Serving Library Annual 20/21 is published by Roma and functions as a catalogue for the collection’s semi-permanent display. Click here to read more and buy.
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