Nuclear : Art & Radioactivity

A programme of artists’ films investigating nuclear culture from the perspective of the 21st Century reflecting on 1980s feminist experimental film and activism, gritty dramatic satire of the 1990s, and recent video-essay works from 2009 – 2012. Artists narrate their own experience of nuclear environments in Britain, the Urals, Estonia, Ukraine, Japan and Canada, travelling back home or to sites of disaster to try and capture the invisible or the unimaginable. Investigating the aesthetic implications of radiation reveals the impossibility of capturing an energy that bleaches the images from film and erases the hard drives of digital devices. The films raise important questions for nuclear critique from nuclear entropy, utopian and dystopian belief systems, questioning scientific certainty, political agency and the proliferation of nuclear culture. A roundtable discussion will tackle some of these issues with artists Kodwo Eshun (Otolith Group) and Mark Aerial Waller in conversation with philosopher Liam Sprod, chaired by Susan Kelly. Curated by Ele Carpenter.

Programme

11am Introduction by Ele Carpenter

11.25-12.30 The Otolith Group, The Radiant, 2012

12.30-1pm Mark Aerial Waller, Interview With a Nuclear Contract Worker, 1999 and Mark Aerial Waller, Glow Boys, 1999

1-2pm Light lunch and Isao Hashimoto, A Time-Lapse Map of Every Nuclear Explosion Since 1945 (2003).

2-2.30pm Yelena Popova, Unnamed, 2011. Introduced by Heidi Brunnschweiler

2.30-3pm Sandra Lahire, Uranium Hex, 1988 and Your Greenham, Short films, 2007. Introduced by Ele Carpenter

3-4pm Roundtable discussion: Kodwo Eshun and Mark Aerial Waller with Liam Sprod. Chaired by Susan Kelly.

4pm Tea & Coffee

4.30pm Chris Oakley, Half Life, 2009.

4.45pm Let Them Believe, 2010, Dir. Todd Chandler & Jeff Stark, featuring Eva and Franco Mattes, Ryan C. Doyle

5pm Closing remarks Susan Kelly and Ele Carpenter

5.30pm End

Curated by Ele Carpenter with students from MFA Curating, Goldsmiths: Heidi Brunnschweiller, Lucia Garavaglia, Lucy MacDonald, Laura McLean, George Vasey.

Supported by

The Nuclear Culture on Film programme is a partnership between The Arts Catalyst and Goldsmiths College. Supported by AHRC, Arts Council of England.

The Arts Catalyst

50-54 Clerkenwell Road

London EC1M 5PS
UK

28/04/2013 
11am-5.30pm

See more : www.artscatalyst.org