19
May 2003 – 16 April 2004
Tate Britain, Gallery 40
The use of film and
video by artists in Britain over the past decade has attracted much attention.
However, artists have worked with film and video in this country from
the beginning of the twentieth century and now, for the first time, Tate
Britain aims to explore this history.
An ambitious series
of display of 170 works by 130 artists aims to reveal the full range,
variety and originality of this history, from films made close to the
cinema’s birth in the 1890s to work realised at the start of the
twenty-first century. Many of the works have not been seen before in a
gallery context, and some have not been seen publicly since their first
screenings. The displays bring together a wide span of artists from early
filmmakers such as Humphrey Jennings and Norman Mclaren to recent Turner
Prize winner Steve McQueen, and key conceptual and structural filmmakers
of the 70s, scratch video artists and super8mm romantics inspired by Derek
Jarman in the 80s.
The first of four
day-long sequences will start at Tate Britain on 19 May. Each programme
will be shown at Tate Britain for a period of three months (Prog 1: 19
May – 10 August 2003,
Prog 2: 11 August – 2 November 2003, Prog 3: 3 November –
25 January 2003 Prog 4: 26 January – 16 April 2004) and a related
series of longer films by British artists will be shown on Sundays in
the Clore auditorium.
Within each day-long
programme the films and videos have been clustered in shorter thematic
and historical groups which suggest continuities of interest and approach
across generations: film’s ability to encapsulate the everyday and
to mimic memory; the challenges of portraiture and the creation of visual
music. Other groupings reflect the ways in which artists have explored
video and film at particular moments: the early 1970s, when conceptual
filmmaking emerged and, in parallel, artists at the London Filmmakers’
Co-op focused on the materials of their medium; the 1930s, when a committed
avant-garde worked on the margins of the mainstream industry; and the
early 1990s, as artists began to respond to the possibilities of digital
editing.
A Century of Artists’
Film in Britain has been curated by David Curtis and is an Illuminations
production for Tate, with the support of Central St Martins, the AHRB
Centre for British Film & Television Studies, the LUX and the British
Film Institute.
For further press information please contact Nadine Thompson/Sioban Ketelaar
Tate Press Office, Millbank, London, SW1P 4RG
Call 020 7887 8730/31/01 Fax 020 7887 8729 E-mail pressoffice@tate.org.uk
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