L U X > New Acquisitions > February 2007
distribution, collection, exhibition, publishing, research
LUX, 18 Shacklewell Lane, London E8 2EZ, UK
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This page lists all new works added to the LUX collection in February 2007. For a full list of all LUX collection holdings, see our online catalogue.

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GEORGE BARBER | INGE BLACKMAN | JEM COHEN | STEPHEN DWOSKIN | CHARLOTTE GINSBORG | ANJA KIRSCHNER | ROSALIND NASHASHIBI | BEN RIVERS | SEMICONDUCTOR

 

Car Painting

GEORGE BARBER
AUTOMOTIVE ACTION PAINTING
UK, 2006,  6 min, video

In Car Painting a man arrives in a van by the side of a road.  He takes out various pots of paint and starts to throw colour on the road.  Understandably, motorists avoid him.  Soon though there is not enough space for the cars to avoid the paint and so the traffic begins to drag the paint out across the dual carriageway and create an abstract painting.  Fundamentally, the piece is a painting done by traffic. Car Painting is an ironic comment on Abstract Expressionism and shows that a work containing emotion and passion can be created by people driving to work.  Nobody has ever thought this. Rational beings driving cars engage with colour and become the brushes producing a very lush ‘action’ canvas by the end. GB

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Legacy

INGE 'CAMPBELL' BLACKMAN
LEGACY
UK, 2006, 18 min, video

Legacy is a film about how intimate relationships in families descended from slaves have been affected by inherited learned behaviour from their ancestors.

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Building a Broken Mousetrap

JEM COHEN
BUILDING A BROKEN MOUSETRAP
USA, 2006,  63 min, video

This music document is in many ways a sister project to Instrument, Cohen’s much celebrated long-form portrait of D.C. band Fugazi. Building a Broken Mousetrap, a collaboration with Matt Boyd, features the Dutch band The Ex, another established but still furiously intense punk outfit, here they are vividly captured in concert. Cohen’s delicate touch turns this into the most poetic and unexpectedly political concert film I’ve seen in some time. The first half, shot in stunning 16mm black and white, is occasionally interrupted by degraded landscapes reminiscent of Chain, his 2004 installation and feature film. The second half, shot in DV’s saturated, bright colours, cuts away to longer interactions that concern wealth and power on the streets around the concert hall. The music is wild – sophisticated and primitive, angry but totally under control. This is Cohen advocating for a kind of musician, an idea of what music and its makers could be. That somehow gets to the core of what his filmmaking practice is and what extraordinary results it can yield. Noah Cowan

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Nightshots

STEPHEN DWOSKIN
NIGHTSHOTS
(1, 2, 3 parts of a series)
UK, 2007, 33 mins, b/w, sd, video

The first three of a series of intriguingly personal and erotic engagements seen in the privacy of darkness and transformed by the iridescence of the night light.

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The Mirroring Cure

CHARLOTTE GINSBORG
THE MIRRORING CURE
UK, 2006,  28 min, video

Tracing the life of a large construction site from demolition to the completion of new office space, The Mirroring Cure focuses on the company secretary who decides to interview those employed around her. She wants to understand their relationship to work, their hopes, fears and anxieties. We witness her fascination with the Design Manager whom she discovers suffers from a loss of balance exacerbated by the large scale of the site. She becomes intrigued by the bizarre and surreal solution he develops to cope with his affliction, his ‘mirroring cure’. Appearing initially as a documentary detailing the complexity of personal identities formed through being 'at work', as well as the effects of architecture on behaviour, the film begins to incorporate fictional elements leaving the viewer unsure as to where reality lies. To what extent the characters are acting remains ambiguous. Shot on 16mm over a two year period the film forms an intimate portrait of five working lives set against the visually arresting and constantly shifting architecture of the building development. CG

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Polly II

ANJA KIRSCHNER
POLLY II
2006, UK, 30 min, video

Set in the not-so-distant future POLLY II – part satirical sci-fi, part soap opera and Brechtian ‘Lehrstueck’ – portrays the lives of pirates and outcasts surviving in the flooded ruins of East London, a lawless zone set to become the latest in luxury waterside living according to government plans and venturing developers’ wet dreams. The film imagines a future insurrection coloured by the legacy of dispossessed peasants, political radicals, whores, sailors, pirates, and former slaves whom once inhabited East London and fought a daily battle against their subjection to poverty, displacement and judicial terror.

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Stone and Table

ROSALIND NASHASHIBI
STONE AND TABLE
UK, 1994, 4 min, 16mm film loop

The shadow of a human being, passes over timeless and indifferent objects at three frames per second.

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The State of Things

ROSALIND NASHASHIBI
THE STATE OF THINGS
UK, 2000, 3.5 min, 16mm

A Glasgow jumble sale set to an Egyptian classic love song from the 1920’s.

Watching the film the audience is unsure where and when the action takes place, questioning the simplistic, unspecific and convenient conceptions of East and West.

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Open Day

ROSALIND NASHASHIBI
OPEN DAY
UK, 2001, 12 min, 16mm

A musical film structured around six scenes in a city.

Six scenes in London set to different pieces of music that add a fictional screen or act as counterpoint to the action.

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Midwest

ROSALIND NASHASHIBI
MIDWEST
UK, 2002, 12 min, 16mm

Morning to night in the streets of Omaha, Nebraska.

In Midwest, the camera is on the street, watching people going about their business through the day - hanging around, walking, going in and out of a Mexican café and waiting outside a rehab centre. We see the forced leisure of a week day, and how people use their public spaces and neighbourhood streets. Midwest was made together with Midwest: Field which explores what goes on in the superflat landscape outside the city.

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Midwest Field

ROSALIND NASHASHIBI
MIDWEST FIELD
UK, 2002,  3.5 min, 16mm

A group of middle-aged men fly remote-control glider planes and spend a lazy afternoon in the wide, flat fields outside Omaha. Midwest: Field is counterpoint to Midwest, which explores the inside of Omaha's neighbourhoods.

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Dahiet Al Bareed, District of the Post Office

ROSALIND NASHASHIBI
DAHIET AL BAREED, DISTRICT OF THE POST OFFICE
UK, 2002,  6 min, 16mm

One slow, hot afternoon in a neighbourhood built to be a utopian suburb for employees of the Palestinian Post Office; now becomes a lawless no-man’s-land between occupied East Jerusalem and Ramallah.

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Humaniora

ROSALIND NASHASHIBI
HUMANIORA
UK, 2003,  12 min, 16mm

Observing the architecture of the State’s attitude to care.
Humaniora looks at British hospitals from two ideological eras; Victorian, and post-war. The film was made after the Thomas Mann novel The Magic Mountain , where sickness and convalescence become the creed for an elevated society.

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Blood and Fire

ROSALIND NASHASHIBI
BLOOD AND FIRE
UK, 2003,  7 min, 16mm

Several old ladies and one man share a meal with bright, plastic beakers and much laughter at the Salvation Army in Portobello, a seaside town by Edinburgh, Scotland.

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Hreash House

ROSALIND NASHASHIBI
HREASH HOUSE
UK, 2004, 20 min, 16mm

One family as an entire community

Hreash House shows an extended Palestinian family living a collective existence in a concrete block in Nazareth. It shows a feast and its aftermath during Ramadan.

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University Library

ROSALIND NASHASHIBI
UNIVERSITY LIBRARY
2004, 7 min, 16mm

Books, dust and young people.

New students negotiate shelves, lifts and dusty pot plants, keeping silent and occasionally sneaking looks at one another.

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Juniper Set

ROSALIND NASHASHIBI
JUNIPER SET
UK, 2004,  1 min, 16mm film loop

A film loop of train seats with patterned upholstery, echoing the absent bodies, like sculptures of human beings side by side, with a corner of suburbia showing through the train window.

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Park Ambassador

ROSALIND NASHASHIBI
PARK AMBASSADOR
UK, 2004,  5 min, 16mm film loop

The Park Ambassador is a figure of abstract authority. A totemic presence, he remains rooted while people pass and light changes dramatically around him. He seems to affect these changes by his powerful presence.

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Eyeballing

ROSALIND NASHASHIBI
EYEBALLING
UK, 2005,  10 min, 16mm

The anthropomorphic city

A series of faces found in architectural facades or in objects around an apartment are juxtaposed with shots of policemen in uniform loitering around their precinct.

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This is my land

BEN RIVERS
THIS IS MY LAND
UK, 2006,  14 min, 16mm

A portrait of Jake Williams – who lives alone within miles of forest in Aberdeenshire, Scotland. Jake always has many jobs on at any one time, rarely throws anything away, is an expert mandolin player, and has compost heaps going back many years. He has a different sense of time to most people in the 21st Century, which is explicitly expressed in his idea for creating hedges by putting up bird feeders. It struck me straight away that there were parallels between our ways of working - I have tried to be as self-reliant as possible and be apart from the idea of industry - Jake's life and garden are much the same - he can sustain himself from what he grows and so needs little from others. To Jake this isn’t about nostalgia for some treasured pre-electric past, but more, a very real future. BR

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Acousticity

SEMICONDUCTOR
ACOUSTICITY
UK, 2006, 3 min, video (surround sound DVD version also available. 

During many excursions around the Czech capital, Prague, Semiconductor photographed and recorded the sights and sounds of the city; reaching from the suburbs and its factories to the city's famous medieval centre. Each section of the film is controlled and animated by the sound that was recorded in situ at time of photographing, creating a physical connection between the images and the audio. The animated photos bring to life the fabric of the city using resonance to open a window onto the physicality of the structures themselves. The buildings appear to be exploding with energetic particles leaving it unclear whether we are looking at time speeded up, or an unseen moment in time. 

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Brilliant Noise

SEMICONDUCTOR
BRILLIANT NOISE
UK, 2006, 6 min, video

Brilliant Noise takes us into the data vaults of solar astronomy. After sifting through hundreds of thousands of computer files made accessible via open access archives, Semiconductor have brought together some of the suns finest unseen moments. These images have been kept in their most raw form, revealing the energetic particles and solar wind as a rain of white noise. This black and white grainy quality is routinely cleaned up by NASA, usually hiding the processes and mechanics in action behind the capturing procedure. Most of the imagery has been collected by satellites orbiting the Earth as single frames, or files of information, that are then reorganised into spectral sequences. The soundtrack brings to light the hidden forces at play upon the solar surface, by directly translating the intensity of the brightness into audio manipulation.

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Do You Think Science...

SEMICONDUCTOR
DO YOU THINK SCIENCE….
UK, 2006,12 mins, DVD video

By asking a group of space physicists the unanswerable, Semiconductor reveal the hidden motivations driving scientists to the outer limits of human knowledge. In an attempt to find meaning within the question, they open a Pandora's Box of limitations within science itself, revealing their own philosophical confines. Issues of faith, medicine and the laws of matter are raised to illustrate the infinitely complex universe we live in.

Thanks to the following scientists at The Space Sciences Laboratory, UC Berkeley, California, USA. for their contributions to this work:
Stuart Bale, David Brain, John Bonnell, Nahide Craig, Janet Luhmann, Bryan Mendez, Forrest Mozer, Stephen Mende, Ilan Roth, Chris Snead, Charles Townes, Andrew Westphal

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Earth Moves

SEMICONDUCTOR
EARTH MOVES
UK, 2006, 5 mins TFT/DVD installation, widescreen

Earth Moves is a continuation of Semiconductors exploration into how unseen forces affect the fabric of our world.  The limits of human perception are exposed, revealing a world which is unstable and in a constant state of animation as the forces of acoustic waves come into play on our surroundings.

The south-east of England is explored through a series of five audio controlled photographic panoramas. Semiconductor collected sound recordings and photographs on location at: The A23 at Pease Pottage, Witterings NT reserve, Findon Valley, John St Brighton and Adur Valley cement factory. The sounds were used to re-animate the landscape at each location.

Earth Moves is an Arts Council England commission and is permanently installed at the South East offices, Brighton.

Earth Moves is only available for installation on a widescreen TFT or equivalent.
It is not available for cinema projection.

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