Category: film installation

Douglas Gordon, 24 Hour Psycho (1993)

How can one comment on a work of art based on an experience of no more than 10 minutes with it, when the entirety lasts an entire day? Well, the elevator pitch for Gordon’s film tells you enough. This is the Alfred Hitchcock thriller Psycho (1960) slowed down from 24…

Mikhail Karikis, SeaWomen (2012)

The baddest gang on the planet don’t ride Harleys out into the California desert. They ride mopeds around a South Korean island and dive for octopus in the choppy North Pacific. Bad-meaning-good is maybe not the word, but the sea-women are certainly tough cookies. Aged between 60 and 90, they…

Shona Illingworth, Lesions in the Landscape (2015)

In a rare moment of colour footage, this film by Shona Illingworth features figures with torches who work their way around a green twilight landscape, riddled with stony ruins. The searching orange beams bring to mind the point of our consciousness, while the vastness of the terrain stands for all we…

Yto Barrada, Faux départ (2015)

Both artworks and fossils can be forged. That’s the alliance revealed in a new film by Barrada which takes an artistic look at the forgery of prehistoric life forms. The forgery takes place in eastern Morocco between the Atlas Mountains and the Sahara Desert. This region was once the bed…

Marcus Coates, Dawn Chorus (2007)

Slow down birdsong. Imitate it with human vocal chords. Record that and bring it back up to speed. And what you have is an uncannily accurate impersonation of any given feathered friend. If you didn’t know this, and few will at first, the 2007 film installation Dawn Chorus looks like…

Amanda Loomes, Relict Material (2015)

In the servant quarters of a Regency Townhouse in Brighton, you can now see a film about one of the harshest jobs on the South Coast. Namely, dredging and processing aggregate for cement. And as if to stop the metropolitan art crowd from getting too cosy, civil engineer turned artist…

Simon Faithfull, REEF (2014)

The real underwater world has already exercised its independence from the work of Simon Faithfull. REEF was fully working for six days, after which he lost transmission. But there is no going back. The artist did manage to burn and sink a 32-tonne ship. He did manage to salvage nearly…

Jordan Baseman, A Cold Hand on a Cold Day (2013)

It is all very well writing with a skull on your desk (I don’t). But you might still wonder how much thought the saints of old gave to the more practical aspects of death. Now, however, American artist Baseman brings you right into that seldom-explored margin between death and burial/cremation,…