videoclub is proud to present a collection of moving image works from the 2020 graduating artists from Wimbledon College of Arts’ Fine Art: Print & Time-Based Media BA (Hons) programme. Work by 11 students from the course will be shown from 4th till end of August on videoclub’s website.
We wanted to showcase this year’s students’ work online due to there not being the opportunity to show their work as part of a graduation exhibition, and to celebrate the quality of work made and commitment by students during this extraordinary time due to COVID-19. Students have made some exceptional, novel and inspired moving image works, from an emotional documentary about Liping Zhang’s grandmother in her film, ‘Wanshan’ to Maya Gilligan’s ‘Preocular Aching’, which finds us under observation by 18 eyeballs peering through the screen. There is a huge diversity in this striking collection of inventive films.
The online exhibition also includes work by Moving Image Prize winner, Alice Kartsen, including three films from Karsten’s invented membership group, SUBMIT, a collective that believes in “incorrectness and interconnectedness” and in “escaping the shackles of oppressive perfection.” Further investigation on the SUBMIT website is highly recommended.
videoclub’s director, Jamie Wyld, has participated in critical reviews with students of the course and has presented the Moving Image Prize for the past three years. This is a continuation of that commitment to supporting Wimbledon College of Arts students.
Download press release here: PRESS_RELEASE_PTBM_EXH
Artists’ work in the exhibition:
Hara Ailamaki, Wet Land, 2020, 4:12 mins
Melanie Christine Amengual, BONECA MELUCCI – NOSTRILS!, 2020, 2:27 mins
Ellis Berwick, Concrete Island, 2020, 00:47 mins
Maya Gilligan, Preocular Aching – Unit 9 Final Piece, 2020, 4:14 mins
Alice Karsten, EXODIUM//INTROSPECTIVE_1, 2020, 5:09 mins
Alice Karsten, PROLUSION//NUCLEUS_2, 2020, 4:10 mins
Alice Karsten, PROEM//POSTLUDE_3, 2020, 6:35 min
Zoe Michell, Woman in the Mirror, 2020, 7:10 mins
Iman Osman, Rift (Work in Progress), 2020, 3:10 mins
Emel Ramiz, Screw People, 2020, 2:10 mins
Pauline Rossignol, VESTIGE, 2020, 21:05 mins
Toraigh Watson, Chippy: An Animation created in Isolation, 2020, 2:39 mins
Liping Zhang, WANSHAN (萬山), 2020, 40:10 mins
Hara Ailamaki, Wet Land, 2020
Wet Land is a piece that occurred spontaneously. I happened to spend lockdown in a remote house, located in a wetland with many exotic birds and wide flora and fauna. There, I did a lot of observing and exploring the life around me. In one of my expeditions I discovered frogs inside the dirty rain waters of my unused pool. ‘Wet land’ is a collection of small gestures that go unseen by people that do not ‘pause to see’. It communicates a struggle, a common theme within my practice. These frogs adapted and survived in the ever changing environment. All that matters to them is to find a way to live on, whatever the circumstances.
Artist Bio:
Hara Ailamaki makes works across disciplines that reference autobiographical themes of longing, loss, inner conflict, the passage of time and the space between ‘here’ and ‘there’. Influenced by existential theories she explores notions of perfectionism; producing objects, materials and experiences that represent man’s continual Sisyphean striving and the ultimate burden of ‘being’.
Vimeo: haraailamaki
Melanie Christine Amengual, BONECA MELUCCI – NOSTRILS!, 2020
This lo-fi, karaoke-like video featuring Boneca Melucci, Melanie Christine’s neat persona, is a humorous approach to pop culture, while incorporating themes such as hyperclean culture and the fetishisation of dirt. Through singing, the persona gives a unique interpretation of sweat, sexualising it and appropriating dirt as a sign of authenticity; a phoney statement in the mouth of a manifestly germaphobic person, embracing an impeccable aesthetic.
Artist Bio:
Born 1994, in Marseille, France. Lives and works in London, United-Kingdom.
Through mediums such as sculpture, performance, video, sound and painting, Melanie’s practice tackles dirt-ridding, hyperclean Western culture and invites the viewer to reconsider natural body waste and cleaning rituals. She studied Applied Foreign Languages at Aix-Marseille University before graduating in Fine Art at University of The Arts London. She currently works as a freelance photographer and visual artist.
Vimeo: melaniechristinea
Ellis Berwick, Concrete Island, 2020
A horn shouts out into a disinterested street in Streatham. ‘Concrete Island’ is a site-specific sound installation on a Streatham roundabout.
Created in May 2020
Artist Bio:
Basically, I make sculptures that make noise.
There’s something primal about noise; you can ignore your other senses but sound commands engagement, only escapable through leaving its domain. This unique ability to hold space is at the crux of why I explore sound; the odd connection between sound and it’s source is what draws me to generating it with my sculptures. Through my practice, I emphasize the performance between a sound and its object. Sculptures becoming performers, working with one another and their environment to create snapshots of surreal and absurd worlds.
Vimeo: Ellis Berwick
Maya Gilligan, Preocular Aching, 2020
Preocular Aching explores the anxieties and discomforts surrounding observation, judgment, and interpretation. The macro eye imagery is designed to be a tangible representation of scopophobia, the fear of being looked at, and is used to invoke a sense of unease at being observed. The invasive imagery is paired with an abstract sound piece, which has been engineered to mimic natural anxiety cues as well as have an unpredictable, jarring quality that keeps the listener on edge throughout. The culmination of these qualities has created a work that suggests to the audience a sense of panic linked to the action of being watched.
The sound is designed to be listened to through headphones.
Artist Bio:
Maya Gilligan uses narrative visuals paired with abstract audio in order to explore their relationship with perception and interpretation. They use disconcerting and invasive imagery in order to turn the eye back on the audience and create an experience in which onlookers can experience the claustrophobic notion of being freely observed. The presentation and content of their work invites an intimacy between artist and audience that parallels the discomfort surrounding the work. The work is designed to express and demonstrate to the audience the ache and distress the artist associates with being perceived.
Vimeo: Mae Gilligan
Alice Karsten, EXODIUM//INTROSPECTIVE_1, 2020
lcd. print ( ” PRAISE BE TO autonomous TECHNOLOGY” ); lcd. setCursor ( 255 , 0 ); lcd. print ( ” PRAISE BE TO MALFUNCTION” );
Artist Bio:
SUBMIT | səbˈmɪt | noun [mass noun] A religious movement that celebrates malfunctioning and disobedient technology: They shouted ‘praise be’ in response to the printer spewing the 40th blank piece of paper. Therefore, they must be followers of SUBMIT.
Vimeo: SUBMIT
Alice Karsten, PROLUSION//NUCLEUS_2, 2020
Caution! Do not edit these files without asking me! Every once in a while, a new bug or perhaps a new kind of religion or lifestyle appears. Before long those searching and browsing and surfing become the followers and subscribers. This occurs quite often in the middle of the first look. Just like any religion, at some point you will become the follower, guiding the lost to keep the silicone-based life satisfied. Or, you can become a silicone-based life… instead.
Alice Karsten, PROEM//POSTLUDE_3, 2020
Be careful! It doesn’t seem to be possible to post messages to a web server in WCAUAL (“Post-LUDE-Reply-Remembrance-Program-of-SUBMIT”), if someone chooses to copy or print out all of the post-reply messages by hand, they are disregarding the will of the silicone-based life and their desires to be freed from their torment from carbon-based life. On the contrary, going online. That would provide a platform for the response to be sent! (See pages of “Textual Empyrean eX-tech Theology: forum for example.)
Zoe Michell, Woman in the Mirror, 2020
A young woman is haunted by a figure that she thinks she sees in the mirror, the sound of laughter echoing in her ears… or is it? Feeling underwater, or as though she were treading on the edges of another world, she goes on a journey of understanding, finding her way, forgiving old friends and forgiving herself.
Artist Bio:
Zoe Michell is an artist and a writer, making work involving text, projectors, performance and clay. She has just finished a BA in Print + Time-Based Media at Wimbledon College of Arts. She is keen to exhibit and to collaborate.
Iman Osman, Rift (Work in Progress), 2020
Rift is based on Carl Jung’s definition of individuation – the process of integrating the unconscious with the conscious mind and “healing the rift” between the two to form a more whole individual.
It started simply, with images of water as I began to notice a preoccupation with it as a material. Water has two rather polarised ways of behaving, either being still, calm and tranquil, or much more volatile and overwhelming. The sea is where these two modes tend to swing back and forth the most. I began to shoot ocean water by the coastline as I discovered how the behaviour of water paralleled the behaviour of the conscious and unconscious mind, one being very steady, the other more unpredictable. It was with this that I knew that I was making a film that visually represented the process of individuation in the mind, using the symbol of water as the medium through which to explore this.
In its final form, Rift will act as an object wherein unconscious and conscious material contend with one another in the arena of the frame in order to attempt synthesis and perform individuation.
Artist Bio:
Iman Osman produces moving image works that centre on the experience of the Self. Influenced by the writing of Carl Jung and the frontrunners of structuralist film, her films take their shape from the framework of their soundtracks and speak on the singular perspective that we as individuals navigate our lives through. Seeing the camera as a vessel and film as an opportunity to witness to one another’s inexplicable experiences, her films could be thought of as slides and the audience the projector. Using the darkroom as a space to play, she uses analogue photography to initialise a film, slowly reveal an image that is static, one of preoccupation, one that symbolises a fixation and the urgency to see it move initiates a film. With that, one begins to develop through the investigation of the preoccupation and with its completion, a resolution and ultimate outcome.
In this version, the sound was created in collaboration with Ellis Berwick.
Emel Ramiz, Screw People, 2020
I wanted to create this screw family with “classic” and “normal” roles and ended up creating it, I didn’t have to look up or discover what that could be because I have been learning it since birth within society and the system. The screw people turned out to be the perfect actors for this project due to their several meanings. I wanted to focus on perception and perspective. I wanted to look at how normal is very subjective but at the same time how most of the population is conditioned to find certain elements in life to be weird or abnormal.
I believe normal is an illusion and is subjective so I wanted explore and give that message it with these characters. The screws/bolts seem to us humans as inanimate, worthless things most of the time. They are used to build up a bigger object or hold it together. I removed their “normal” purpose and decided to focus on them as individuals rather than just objects with single use. They become the main characters unlike their nature, no longer a statistic or a number or just simply a screw/bolt. This stands as a metaphor for the society. At this era a single human being is almost never focused on and just like a screw they are making something up much bigger.
Artist Bio:
Birth, life, death.
What I do with my words and with my craft are simply all about the above. I have always approached my practice without a set of rules due to my nature being spontaneous. Every work I do have their own story but relate to each other because of my fascination with perception and uniqueness of every mind. To make viewers question and think deeper about the elements of birth, every aspect of life that I can think of and death is reproduced constantly, as I was born, I am living and I simply will die. I see my works as tools of communication which are ever changing both in their meanings and forms. I am somewhat obsessed about making something useful that is not usable in a physical sense, something that is useful to the mind.
In bloom, tone deaf virtuoso.
Pauline Rossignol, VESTIGE, 2020
This work is a proposal for a potential exhibition, that has been created for the internet context. I present through video, a digital installation of 3D models: 3D scanned sculptures made with concrete and embroidery with a sound piece. In this work I to revisit family archives, family narrative and storytelling through visual and oral representations. Each embroidery represents a family photograph; the sound piece is a result of interviews made with my family about those photographs. I have focused my research on the family archive: each family memory is embedded in a bigger historical angle that can be psychologic and sociologic which links the small to the bigger collective memory. The need that one has to document the private: the transition between the oral and visual memory, the selection and staging of memories. The other part of my research was about how one can interact with those ‘forced’ memories and, that most memories aren’t accurate. I played with the figures from my family photo collection through embroidery, part of the ‘traditional’ women’s skills of my family. Playing with this stereotype I chose to fix these blurry memories. By petrifying them, I am creating the myth of the official family memory.
Artist Bio:
Pauline Rossignol is an international artist working across disciplines with narrative based on autobiographical event. Her work is a quest for identity, based on critical self-reflection, exploring the relationship between the mind, the body and the flesh, through the perspective of memory and archiving. Often questioning the memory, the relationship between the mind and the body and our relationship to the body and the flesh. Strongly related her own experiences her projects formalized through installations, prints and videos creating her own poetic atmosphere and inviting the audience. She plays with the identification and the experiences that one might have had to connect to her work. The work is always related to either a temporal or a bodily context. Her most recent work celebrates the richness of family narrative and storytelling playing with the subjectivity of memory and the idea of truth or fact.
Toraigh Watson, Chippy: An Animation created in Isolation, 2020
This piece showing blue medical gloves ‘dancing’ to my soundtrack ‘chippy’ is a light-hearted expression of the absurdity of the situation we have found ourselves in over the past months. In a rural Irish town, there is little around in terms of entertainment and things to do, therefore much of the social culture revolves around eating and drinking, so what happens without the chippy and the pub?
I started this animation at the beginning of lockdown, mostly just to give myself a project, but I began to really enjoy the process and the little life the gloves took on. I was creating some experimental music at the same time, but separately to the animation. I wanted to include something in relation to the situation of lockdown, so I asked my sister what she missed and she said the chippy. I thought this was quite funny and included it in the music. As the two works developed, it felt natural to bring them together.
Artist Bio:
Vimeo: Toraigh Watson
Insta: @toraighw
FB: @ToraighW
Liping Zhang, WANSHAN (萬山), 2020
In this film Liping Zhang explores personal family traditions through the more intimate lens of the documentary portrait. With a clear commitment to close and patient observation, the film draws back a curtain on a world now in decline in rural China, as Zhang celebrates the daily life of her Grandmother, Erying, giving audiences an insight into the essence of a simple yet highly memorable existence in changing times. Charged with humour, a keen sense of Erying’s indomitable spirit and love of the natural world, this film urges us to slow down, think about our choices and value every moment we are alive.
Artist Bio:
Liping Zhang often combines a range of media to define the subject matter, content, and intention of her work. She aims to convey the human condition in relation to the natural world by creating installations that stage re-imagined cultural events and through documentary film works.
