Still from ‘Two Sunrises’ by Jenny Stark

As part of Time Out First Thursdays, IMT Gallery will be screening of two films by American artist Jenny Stark in collaboration with Filmarmalade.

Jenny Stark’s ‘Two Sunrises’ assembles a series of dramatised vignettes that describe one night’s experience of the waitress Susie, whilst working at the late night diner Lil Joe’s. Stark’s film manages to successfully describe the jealousies and friendships of the characters who are caught in these low-paid jobs and the knowingly flirtatious manner of the various customers that populate these minor cathedrals to 24-hour modernity.

The evening also includes the World Premier screening of Stark’s latest film work, ‘An Academic Question’ and a round table discussion with the artist and Gordon Shrigley, the founder of Filmarmalade.

Jenny Stark recently screened work at the New York Underground Film Festival, Aurora Picture Show, Houston, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Mexico City, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Washington DC, the LA Film Forum and at the Viennale, Vienna. She was born in the USA and lives and works in Sacramento.

A limited edition DVD of Jenny Stark’s ‘Two Sunrises’ film work, published by Filmarmalade will be available to buy on the night for £12.99

Filmarmalade is an artists run project established to publish on DVD selected artists’ films and video works, so as to encourage a wider access to the moving image and to allow a greater understanding, through specially commissioned interviews of how each artist situates their work, in relation to the history of art and contemporary fine art practice.

filmarmalade.co.uk

Film Screening: Words of Advice – William S. Burroughs on the Road
Saturday 31st July 16:30
Saturday 31st July 20:00

As part of Dead Fingers Talk: The Tape Experiments of William S. Burroughs, IMT will be screening a documentary directed by Lars Movin and Steen Møller Rasmussen including never-before-seen footage of Burroughs’ visit to Denmark in 1983, and his later years in Lawrence, Kansas. ‘Words of Advice’ is an extraordinary document of William S. Burroughs in the 1980s, prompting the Danish Film Institute to award Rasmussen the Roos Award for “outstanding efforts in documentary filmmaking”.

In 1983, the counter culture icon and author of the cult classic Naked Lunch, William S. Burroughs, traveled throughout Scandinavia making a series of personal appearances. Twenty years later, filmmakers Lars Movin and Steen Moller Rasmussen found never-before-seen footage of his Copenhagen visit and set out on the road to record new material, telling the story of the acclaimed author’s later work - especially what is known as The Last Trilogy - and his unique performance skills.

The result is Words of Advice: William S. Burroughs on the Road, a compelling portrait of one our most enigmatic public figures. Featuring: James Grauerholz, John Giorno, Hal Willner, Jennie Skerl, Ann Douglas, Regina Weinreich, and others. Music by: Bill Laswell/Material, Patti Smith, Islamic Diggers, and others.

Admission: £8
Book

Performance Evening: Dead Fingers Talk Live
Sunday 18th July 18:00 - 21:00

Ascsoms and Solina Hi-Fi performed works inspired by the cut-up experiments of William S. Burroughs and the exhibition Dead Fingers Talk.

Solina Hi-Fi developed from arts collective CutUp, known for their advertising billboard interventions. Solina Hi-Fi utilise hand built sound machines that apply William Burroughs and Brion Gysin’s methods of cutting up and reassembling as audiovisual performance.

Ascsoms is London based audio artist Adam J Wimbush who primarily works with processed field recordings, electronics and acoustic elements. His compositions are assembled from the results of numerous improvised and manipulated sonic experiments, in this case from recordings collected from Dead Fingers Talk.

On the evening there was also additional music by Joel Cahen, a curator, photographer, filmmaker and sound artist. Cahen’s mashups are rearranged cut ups of various genres of music, sound environments and dialogue, he regularly hosts a show on Resonance FM called SoundSoup where he DJs mashups and abstract sound narratives.

To coincide with the exhibition Dead Fingers Talk: The Tape Experiments of William S. Burroughs, IMT Gallery are hosting a series of talks and events.

Talk: Listening in Present Time
Saturday 12 June 18:00-21:00
Salomé Voegelin, David Burrows and Mark Jackson discussed the exhibition in relation to contemporary practice.
Voegelin is an artist and writer concerned with the practice and philosophy of sound. She is the author of Listening to Noise and Silence: Towards a Philosophy of Sound Art published by Continuum Press in May 2010. Her sonic pieces use a documentary approach, to glean from the interviewee a truth beyond the visual. She is a senior lecturer and a course leader of the MA Sound Arts at the London College of Communication.
David Burrows is a British contemporary artist and writer. His work consists of drawings and paint-spattered, debris-littered, haphazard installations. Burrows is, with Simon O’Sullivan, one half of Plastique Fantastique and a former member of the art collective BANK.
Mark Jackson is the curator of ‘Dead Fingers Talk’ and project co-ordinator at IMT.

Talk: Rearrange the Word
Saturday 10th July 18: – 21:00
The second of two talks in response to ‘Dead Fingers Talk: The Tape Experiments of William S. Burroughs’. For ‘Rearrange the Word’ David Toop, Anthony Joseph, Kit Poulson and Mark Jackson, considered the influence of William S. Burroughs’ work.
David Toop is a musician/composer, writer, curator and significant presence in experimental and improvised music. His pioneering books on music and sound include Rap Attack, Ocean of Sound, Exotica and Haunted Weather. He curated the sound art exhibition ‘Sonic Boom’, and a 2-CD collection of experimental music in Britain from between 1960 - 1977. Toop is currently co-curating, with Tony Herrington, ‘Blow Up: Exploding Sound and Noise’ at Flat Time House, London.
Anthony Joseph is a poet, novelist, academic and musician. He was born in Trinidad, moving to the UK in 1989. His publications include Desafinado, Teragaton, The African Origins of UFOs and Bird Head Son. He is published in several anthologies, including Dark Matter : A Century Of Speculative Fiction From The African Diaspora, Identity Parade, Red and Black, Brown & Beige - Surrealist Writings from Africa and the Diaspora. He performs and lectures internationally, and tours with his band The Spasm Band. Joseph lectures in creative writing at Birkbeck College, University of London and is a AHRC scholar and doctoral candidate at Goldsmiths College.
Kit Poulson is a painter whose work also has a strong installation and performance element. His work in ‘Dead Fingers Talk’ is indicative of his thirteen-year collaboration with artist Alex Baker, which concerns the fragility of communication and language, often revolving around some form of conversation in which they are the protagonists - sometimes responsive, sometimes ignoring or overriding the other’s actions. He has a PhD in Fine Art from Middlesex University.
Mark Jackson is the curator of ‘Dead Fingers Talk’ and project co-ordinator at IMT.

Film Screenings: Words of Advice - William S. Burroughs tickets

Saturday 31 July 16:30 £8.00 Saturday 31 July 20:00 £8.00

If you would prefer not to pay via Paypal please book for any of the events by calling Lindsay Friend on +44 (0) 20 8980 5475 or email lindsay@imagemusictext.com

‘Classic Verbatim’, The Human Separation (2010)
Click on image for slide show.

Dead Fingers Talk is an exhibition presenting two unreleased tape experiments by William Burroughs from the mid 1960s alongside responses by 23 artists, musicians, writers, composers and curators.

Few writers have exerted as great an influence over such a diverse range of art forms as William Burroughs. Burroughs, author of Naked Lunch, The Soft Machine and Junky, continues to be regularly referenced in music, visual art, sound art, film, web-based practice and literature. One typically overlooked, yet critically important, manifestation of his radical ideas about manipulation, technology and society is found in his extensive experiments with tape recorders in the 1960s and ’70s. Dead Fingers Talk: The Tape Experiments of William S. Burroughs is the first exhibition to truly demonstrate the diversity of resonance in the arts of Burroughs’ theories of sound.

listen to your present time tapes and you will begin to see who you are and what you are doing here mix yesterday in with today and hear tomorrow your future rising out of old recordings

everybody splice himself in with everybody else

The exhibition includes work by Alma/Joe Ambrose, Steve Aylett, Alex Baker & Kit Poulson, Lawrence English, The Human Separation, Riccardo Iacono, Anthony Joseph, Cathy Lane, Eduardo Navas, Negativland, o.blaat, Aki Onda, Jörg Piringer, Plastique Fantastique, Simon Reuben White, Giorgio Sadotti, Scanner, Terre Thaemlitz, Thomson & Craighead, Laureana Toledo and Ultra-red, with performances by Ascsoms and Solina Hi-Fi.

Inspired by the expelled Surrealist painter Brion Gysin, and yet never meant as art but as a pseudo-scientific investigation of sounds and our relationship to technology and material, the experiments provide early examples of interactions which are essential listening for artists working in the digital age.

In the case of the work in the exhibition the contributors were asked to provide a “recording” in response to Burroughs’ tape experiments. The works, which vary significantly in media and focus, demonstrate the diversity of attitudes to such a groundbreaking period of investigation.

The exhibition incorporates a programme of events including talks, screenings and a performance evening. Details of these events and how to book can be found here.

Dead Fingers Talk: The Tape Experiments of William S. Burroughs is curated by Mark Jackson. The project is supported by the London College of Communication, CRiSAP and ADi Audiovisual and has been made possible by the kind assistance of Riflemaker, the British Library and Donlon Books.

Still from ‘Exception and the Rule’ by Mirza/Butler

Screening of two films by the artists Mirza/Butler at IMT in collaboration with Filmarmalade.

Mirza/Butler’s ‘Exception and the Rule’ is shot primarily in Karachi and employs a variety of cinematic strategies to negotiate the everyday reality of Pakistan. The work avoids the tropes of a more traditional documentary mode, by framing a series of everyday activities that incorporate performances to camera, public interventions, inner monologues and observation.

The evening will also include the screening of Mirza/Butler’s previous film work, ‘Where A Straight Line Meets A Curve’ and and a round table discussion with Andrew Fisher (associate editor of the journal Philosophy of Photography), Eyal Weizman (Director of the Centre of Research Architecture, Goldsmiths University) and Gordon Shrigley (Filmarmalade).

Mirza & Butler recently exhibited work at Sprüth Magers, London, the Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, Kunsthaus, Zurich, Architecture and Film Biennale, Graz, the Serpentine Pavilion and at the Thomas Dane Gallery, London. They are also founders of the artist film production space, no.w.here and currently live and work in London.

Filmarmalade is an artist run project established to publish on DVD selected artists’ films and video works, so as to encourage a wider access to the moving image and to allow a greater understanding, through specially commissioned interviews of how each artist situates their work, in relation to the history of art and contemporary fine art practice.

filmarmalade.co.uk

Click on image for slide show.

To accompany the exhibition An Exploration of Perforated Space in Four Segments of Words, IMT hosted an artists’ talk with NaoKo TakaHashi on Saturday 6 March from 18:00 - 21:00. Through the talk poet and artist Kristen Kreider, and artists Neil Taylor and Harriet Murray, Directors of Campbell Works, discussed the motivations behind TakaHashi’s work, and issues raised by the exhibition.

NaoKo TakaHashi, born in Nigata, Japan, studied at the Slade School of Fine Art, UCL graduating with an MFA in 2002. She has since exhibited widely in the UK, Europe and the Middle East including the Museum of Contemporary Art Roskilde, Denmark, Five Years Gallery and Campbell Works, London, the Al Ma’mal Foundation for Contemporary Art, Jerusalem and has participated in Volatile Dispersal: Festival of Art Writing, Whitechapel Gallery, London and the 3rd AiM International Biennale, Marrakech, Morocco. She lives and works in London.

NaoKo TakaHashi – An Exploration of Perforated Space in Four Segments of Words is supported by the Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation and the Japan Foundation.

www.naokotakahashi.com

Click on image for slide show.

An Exploration of Perforated Space in Four Segments Words was a site-specific commission by artist NaoKo TakaHashi.

TakaHashi has been exploring issues of language and social space in her work for the last nine years in an investigation of differences and similarities in between her native Japanese and those of countries she is visiting including Israel, Palestine, the United Arab Emirates, and across Europe.

‘An Exploration of Perforated Space in Four Segments of Words’ presented a fictional corrugated cardboard park within which visitors heard autobiographical stories performed by TakaHashi, with music by Terence Kirkbride, former drummer with Oasis. Written through her experiences as a culturally displaced artist engaging with her surroundings we hear about abuse from teenagers and children, shopping at corner shops, bike theft, navigating London’s transport system, bullying, misunderstanding and paranoia. Her stories of the everyday are both heartfelt and uncomfortable and bring a deeply personal aesthetic to the narrative of interacting with people and social spaces.

The exhibition followed on from her text pieces that have become a familiar, if incongruous, sight around East London, their letters woven through scaffolding and railings, and her book ‘Not So Too Much of Much of Everything’ published by Book Works in 2007. In addition to the exhibition IMT hosted an artist’s talk.

NaoKo TakaHashi – An Exploration of Perforated Space in Four Segments of Words was supported by the Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation and the Japan Foundation.

NaoKo TakaHashi, born in Nigata, Japan, studied at the Slade School of Fine Art, UCL graduating with an MFA in 2002. She has since exhibited widely in the UK, Europe and the Middle East including the Museum of Contemporary Art Roskilde, Denmark, Five Years Gallery and Campbell Works, London, the Al Ma’mal Foundation for Contemporary Art, Jerusalem and has participated in Volatile Dispersal: Festival of Art Writing, Whitechapel Gallery, London and the 3rd AiM International Biennale, Marrakech, Morocco. TakaHashi is currently collaborating with Terence Kirkbride on a new lo-fi urban folk project ‘The Marbles Jackson’. She lives and works in London.

www.naokotakahashi.com