An evening of films and performance

The Bread and Alley(1970) by Abbas Kiarostami

Duration: 10mins

An Iranian short film by Abbas Kiarostami. The film was made whilst he was the co-director of the cinema department in the new Centre for the Intellectual Development of Children and Adolescents in Tehran. The film tells the story of a boy walking home with a loaf of bread who is confronted by a hungry dog.

Returning(2009) by Lucy Parker

16mm Film. Colour. Silent.

Duration: 9mins

I thought about the idea that ‘once we have learnt to read and a word is placed before us it is impossible not to read it’* I saw that this applied to the costumes (at the National theatres archive) and questioned to what degree I was able to read them, how specific I could be in placing them to a narrative.

*Hollis Frampton writing about his film Zorns Lemma in the The Garden in the Machine, Scott MacDonald

Looking and Listening Class(2010) by Lucy Parker

16mm Film. Colour. Sound.

Duration: 9mins

Filmmaker James Benning takes his film students at CalArts to locations and asks that they spend time looking and listening with no means to record their findings. I took myself on a looking and listening tour to experience how it altered my way of being in and my understanding of places that I had visited before. Two weeks later I took a group of film students on the same tour. I documented them in the locations from a distance not wanting to interfere with their experience.

Extracts(from 2010 ongoing) by Lucy Parker

This film is documenting a rural home for adults who have learning disabilities where I worked intermittently for 6 years. I have been interested in making a portrait film—observing how routines in weekly life are focused on nurture and development; be that through lessons, gardening and the caring of animals—where animal/ human interactions are proven to have positive effects on development.

I have filmed over the duration of 9 months returning to the home every two weeks.

Scotty and Stuart,SkatingandEdwin Denbyby Stewart Sherman

Total duration: 8 mins

Stuart Sherman died aged 55 in 2001. He lived and worked in New York for much of his life performing in theatres, bars, streets and parks.

‘It was just like sweeping my apartment,’ Sherman said about the ‘Spectacles’ [A series of his short performances]. ‘I didn’t become a character, I didn’t emphasize anything. It was more in the style of the performance of household chores.’ There is also a sense that making art was, for him, a necessary task: if you don’t sweep, dust piles up. That ‘dust’, as much of his visual work suggests, was linguistic in nature. Sherman explored language compulsively, all the accretions of meaning that appear in the spaces between objects and their names.

Steven Stern, Frieze issue 129

This is the Word for Fisherman(2009) by Siân Robinson Davies

Duration: 20 mins

A performance in which objects are encoded as elements of a story. The audience must remember the code in order to follow the tale of a fisherman’s quest to catch a fish.

LimaZulu