The Artangel Collection
Introduction
The Artangel Collection is a national initiative enabling notable film and video installations – commissioned and produced by Artangel over the past 20 years – to be presented in galleries and museums across the UK, as well as in spaces beyond the gallery.
‘Over the past two decades, we’ve been fortunate to collaborate with a range of remarkable artists whose powerful visions have set a new benchmark in film and video. We want their work to be seen as broadly as possible and under the best available conditions. Thanks to the generosity of those artists, the funders of this timely initiative and the creative energy of our new co-commissioning partners, the Collection will allow Artangel to spread its wings even more widely.’ James Lingwood and Michael Morris, Co-Directors
Centred around ground-breaking moving image projects, the collection comprises work by contemporary artists and film-makers including Francis Alÿs, Yael Bartana, Jeremy Deller, Atom Egoyan, Douglas Gordon, Paul Pfeiffer, Tony Oursler and Catherine Yass. The Artangel Collection has been developed in partnership with Tate and thanks to support from the National Lottery through Arts Council England, Esmée Fairbairn Foundation and the John Ellerman Foundation, these works are all now available for loan.
‘Artangel has consistently brought into being extraordinary works by contemporary artists. We are delighted that Artangel will be collaborating with Ikon and the Whitworth Art Gallery to produce new works and that James Lingwood and Michael Morris have announced they will donate to Tate film and video works commissioned by Artangel over the last two decades. This most generous and imaginative gesture would ensure that these remarkable works of art could be enjoyed by generations to come and would be made available for loan to galleries in the UK and beyond.” Nicholas Serota, Director of Tate
Francis Alÿs Seven Walks, 2005 Guards, 2004–5, video projection, 28 minutes The Nightwatch, 2004, installation of 20 monitor screens, 19 minutes Railings, 2004, 3-screen video projection, 9 minutes, 15 seconds Ice4Milk, 160 colour slides shown via two slide projectors + Pebblewalk, 1999; Sunny/ Shady, 2004; Knots, 2005; The Commuters, 2005; A Personal Repertoire of possible Behaviour While Walking the Streets in London Town, 2005; Associated drawings and archive
Exhibiting at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, December 2012 ‘A short film shows him rattling a stick along the railings of Nash’s Park Crescent. He does it seemingly casually, puffing a cigarette as he goes, a scrawny figure in a raincoat, but keeps to a strict tempo. Then the film cuts to Onslow Gardens where his stick-rattling becomes a percussion piece. Railings, he has noticed, are a very London thing’. Hugh Pearlman, The Sunday Times, 18 September 2005
View slideshow online
With Seven Walks, Francis Alÿs offers a poetic intervention into the everyday life of London. Over five years, he walked the city’s streets, mapping its habits and rituals in a range of different media – the ensuing films, videos, paintings and drawings were presented at 21 Portman Square in 2005 for the artist’s first major solo exhibition in the UK. Guards follows 64 Coldstream Guards as they march through the City of London; The Nightwatch uses View video online
surveillance cameras to trace a fox let loose in the National Portrait Gallery at night; and Railings explores the rhythmic possibilities of characteristic feature of Regency London. These video works, made in collaboration with Rafael Ortega, are presented alongside drawings, maps, photographs and an archive of research materials, all of which was acquired by Tate in 2006.
Clio Barnard The Arbor, 2010 Digital Video, 94 minutes
‘The overall effect is devastating, as multi-layered and dissonant as a Schoenberg symphony, and a nightmarish impression of how the writer experienced both reality and performance. Barnard’s original vision was justly rewarded with the best new documentary filmmaker prize.’ Sebastian Doggart, The Telegraph, 21 May 2012
Andrea Dunbar, the tenacious young playwright once described as ‘a genius straight from the slums’ grew up on the notorious Buttershaw Estate in Bradford. When she tragically died at the age of 29 in 1990, her daughter Lorraine was just 10 years old. Now 29 and in prison for drug rehabilitation, the film follows Lorraine’s personal journey as she is introduced to her mother’s plays and letters. Artist and director Clio Barnard (who also grew up in the Bradford region) spent two years interviewing members of the Dunbar family and local residents before creating an audio ‘screenplay’ that was lip-synched by actors. The result, as Peter Bradshaw wrote in The Guardian, is ‘a new kind of ‘verbatim cinema’ ... a modernist, compassionate biopic.’
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