Art
Independent Cinema for Everyone
The annual Projections commissions from Tyneside Cinema ask artists to make short films specifically for the context of the cinema. Four artists a year are commissioned to make new work to be screened before feature films at Tyneside Cinema in Newcastle, and at partner cinemas across the UK. Plymouth Arts Cinema is delighted to be one of these partner cinemas this year. The four films commissioned for 2019 will be shown unannounced – a surprise encounter! – before selected films in our March-April programme. Information about each film will be made available to audiences after the screening.
Contoured Thoughts, Evan Ifekoya
UK, 2019, 4’41
Contoured Thoughts is a meditation on desire, recovery and the rituals of communion. A guide and conspirator alike, Ifekoya takes the viewer to another realm where time all but stands still. Regenerated by the blackness of water and land, the artist offers a moment to share the intimate, the erotic and the otherworldly.
Xitana, Sophio Medoidze
UK / Georgia, 2019, 5’50
In the isolated mountainous region of Tusheti in North East Georgia, life has remained largely unchanged since medieval times until last summer, when the Georgian government introduced free wifi access. As a result, the aspirations of young Tushetians are shifting dramatically, caught between nostalgia for the past and yearning for the future – and nowhere is this conflict of desires more pronounced than during Atengenoba, the region’s traditional summer festivities, which also fall within its busiest tourist season.
Big Talk, Susie Green & Simon Bayliss
UK, 2019, 6’05
Artists Susie Green and Simon Bayliss perform on screen as Splash Addict, their ongoing performance, music and video collaboration. Here, they undertake a colour-saturated journey from being hushed, cinema audience members to becoming their best, most exuberant and stylish selves on the screen. Driven by a new dance track written by Green and Bayliss, Big Talk is a humorous yet sincere filmic reflection on human relationships, personal expression and how we might come together to watch, speak and act.
Uncontrollable Universe, James Richards
Germany, 2019, 4’57
In Uncontrollable Universe, James Richards experiments with bringing still images to life via both digital animation and the classic documentary trope of the Ken Burns effect, which tracks across and zooms into archive images. Scans of medical equipment, X-rays and scraps of found material emerge in counterpoint with a fragmentary, manipulated soundtrack, led by the human voice, which ruminates on the relationship between the body and technology. Continuing Richards’ investigation into the formal possibilities of both collage and an embodied, affective moving image, this new work centres on the immersive potential of the cinema auditorium and the position of the viewer within it.