Selection 5: Morgan Quaintance

3 April, 2020 - 17:30
SPHINX CINEMA

 

Morgan Quaintance is a London-based artist and writer, who has also worked as a curator, musician and broadcaster. This trilogy of recent films, grouped together under the title Hysteresis (“the dependence of the state of a system on its history”), brings together archive materials with newly shot 16mm in order to reflect on Britain’s artistic and socio-cultural present and how it’s shaped by its recent past. Unifying seemingly disconnected subjects, from the artist’s mother to an avant-garde sound ensemble, Quaintance makes an impassioned plea for progressive thought and action.

 

In the presence of Morgan Quaintance

Early Years

Mogan Quaintance
,
UK
,
2019
,
HD
,
16'

Early Years is a portrait of Jamaican-born artistic polymath Barbara Samuels. It features an account of her first generation, diasporic experience in London, and her discovery of the liberatory possibilities for self-actualisation offered by an early entry into creative life.

Another Decade

Morgan Quaintance
,
UK
,
2018
,
video
,
27'

Another Decade combines archive and found footage from the 1990s, with newly shot 16mm film and standard definition video. Focusing on testimonies and statements made by artists, theorists and cultural producers that are still pertinent over two decades later, the film is propelled by the sense reality that very little socio-cultural or institutional change has taken place in the United Kingdom. While recent attention paid to the 1990s casts a largely apolitical and monocultural view over the decade, the work seeks to exhume evidence buried in the shallow grave of cultural amnesia of another, more political, iconoclastic, and confrontational decade that promised a future still yet to arrive.

Anne, Richard and Paul

Morgan Quaintance
,
UK
,
2018
,
15'

Anne, Richard and Paul is a film portrait of Bow Gamelan Ensemble, the now defunct group that featured performance artist Anne Bean, sculptor Richard Wilson and musician Paul Burwell. Known for their large-scale performances featuring instruments made from scrap metal, glass and other non-traditional musical materials, the group utilised pyrotechnics and fireworks to create highly choreographed spectacles of noise and light. The film moves between documentary and abstraction, the past and the present to create an impressionistic record of the trio.