BEEF presents: Conspirators of Perception – PART 2

The second part of the BEEF programme brings together artists’ film, expanded cinema and performance. Additionally, workshop sessions by invited artists and BEEF members provide opportunities to learn new techniques and processes across film and sound  to inform a broad exploration of experimental arts practices. 

This is part of a BEEF curated programme series that shines a light on experimental and expanded film practices homegrown in the city and beyond. 

PROGRAMME OVERVIEW

  • Saturday 21 January, 8pm – CUBEEF: BEEF Play the Cube (expanded film & performance) 
  • Tuesday  28 February, 8pm – A body is a body is a body (film programme)
  • Sunday 5 March, 11-4pm – Phytography (workshop)
  • Sunday 5 March, 8pm – Karel Doing: ‘In Vivo’ (film screening)
  • Wednesday 5 April, 8pm – Birgitta Hosea (film screening + artist talk)
  • Saturday 22 April, 12-4pm – Look / Make / Listen / Wander / Talk (free drop-in BEEF workshops at Grow Wilder, nr. Snuff Mills)

This programme is supported by West of England Visual Arts Alliance (WEVAA) and funded by Arts Council England.

Events take place in association with the Cube Cinema – home of independent cinema in Bristol, and screening tickets are £7, Phytography workshop is £15 / £8 concessions – available HERE.

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CUBEEF: BEEF Play the Cube, Saturday 21 January, 8pm 

a live performance and expanded film event featuring outcomes from recent BEEF residency and more.

In November, BEEF artists came together for an intensive three-day residency at the Cube Cinema to explore the place as a space for play and experimentation, alongside developing, and collaborating on individual projects. 

Expect an animated and playful amalgam of film, sound, and performance alongside improvised interactions between BEEF artists, and surprising interventions within the cinema space itself.  

The event will include a Q&A with BEEF members about the residency, and how they work collaboratively and as a collective.

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‘A body is a body is a body’, Tuesday  28 February, 8pm

a selection of short films by Austrian female artists and filmmakers with a Q&A with artist filmmaker Mara Mattuschka.

The programme includes work by the following artists and filmmakers: Mara Mattuschka, Valie Export, Maria Lassnig, Iris Blauensteiner and Christina Moderbacher, Katrina Daschner and Linda Christanell.

This collection of shorts focuses on the central role of the body and its mediation in experimental/feminist Austrian film. In itself a travel in time – bringing together films from early 1970s to 2021 – it highlights not only how women have radically investigated what it means to live in and with a female body but more so how action can reposition the gaze and with it the suture between object and subject. As feminism has evolved since the 1970 so has the engagement with gender identity and the perception of the body. The more recent films in this selection show how the focus has shifted from directly addressing exploitation to including the audience as complicit participants. Nevertheless, the playful yet serious engagement with the body remains central and with it the quest for a non objectifying dialogue as part of gender politics. 

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Phytography Workshop, Sunday 5 March, 11-4pm

Experiment with the method of ‘Phytography’ using a range of natural plant matter and photochemical materials.

The Phytography process enables interaction between the phytochemical properties of plants and photochemical emulsion as a method that strives for a deeper relationship with plants, both through observation and education. The method can be applied and exhibited in various ways: on film, in installations, directly on photopaper and as enlarged prints. Phytography is the practical outcome of a research project by artist Karel Doing focussed on the representation of the natural world in cinema.

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Karel Doing: ‘In Vivo’ Sunday 5 March, 8pm

Film screening, 61 minutes, colour & b/w, 2021. With a talk and Q&A with the artist.

Reality has countless layers, many of these will remain invisible to the untrained eye. In this elegy humans appear like ants, walking around their habitat in a preprogrammed way, while animals and plants act like individuals. This upside-down world has a strange attraction which is at once alienating and deeply familiar.

The surface of the film material itself is present like a skin that breathes and interacts with the living world in manifold ways: grainy, ephemeral, tinted, vibrating. Time and space are blurred into a reality that is both specific and universal. The film is simultaneously a documentary, a home movie and a symphony. We see scraps of the filmmakers’ personal history including encounters with his friends and family. But beyond those commonplace scenes, the film offers an unusual encounter with the real, embedded in a delicate composition of images and sounds.

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Birgitta Hosea, Wednesday 5 April, 8pm

screening of artists’ work alongside a talk about animated installation as an artistic practice and the different ways artists use space as part of it.

Birgitta Hosea is an artist, filmmaker and curator working with expanded animation, time-based drawing and live performance to create experiential installations, embodied events, durational images and short films that expand the concept of the moving image out of the screen and into the present moment. 

She is Professor of Moving Image and Director of the Animation Research Centre at the University for the Creative Arts, Farnham. Having written publications on drawing, performance and experimental animation, her most recent book is Performance Drawing: New Practices Since 1945 (Bloomsbury, 2020) co-written with Maryclare Foá, Jane Grisewood and Carali McCall.

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Look / Make / Listen / Wander / Talk, Saturday 22 April, 12-4pm

BEEF members workshops at Grow Wilder, Frenchay, Bristol, Free drop-in sessions.

Join members of Bristol arts collective Bristol Experimental Expanded Film (BEEF) for an afternoon of free creative arts workshops. Try out a range of activities from botanical plant printing, to eco-processing, drawing on film, cyanotype printing, listening to plants, podcasting, and film making. 

See the BEEF website nearer the time for more information.  

This programme is supported by West of England Visual Arts Alliance (WEVAA) and funded by Arts Council England.

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