A selection of artists’ films exploring and challenging ideas of home, loss, travel, distance and belonging. Curated by Hondartza Fraga
Märit Aronsson, Marc Atkinson, Michael Day, Hondartza Fraga, Maud Haya-Baviera, Esther Johnson, Helene Kazan, Sybella Perry, Miguel Santos, Christiane Thalmann, Andrew and Caitlin Webb-Ellis, Julia Willms
Selected from invitation and open call, Ever Remote presents a selection of contemporary video works that engage or question the meaning of home, elsewhere and all the distances in-between. Each work explores a different aspect of the distances between ourselves and everything else: physical, temporal, cultural, emotional, imagined. Home and elsewhere come across as alien concepts that are constantly being both re- and de-constructed.
A distant light blinks in the horizon, far away into the sea. The wind plays with a tarpaulin making it dance. A young couple talks about love in an idyllic setting. Joggers cross a mountainous snowscape. Strange and familiar landscapes appear unreachable and somehow contrived, and when humans appear they do so as bodiless voice-overs or as emotionally alienated characters in a fragmented narrative, almost like mirages of themselves. An abandoned hotel appears quiet and cinematic before its demolition. A window frames a virtual interior that slowly changes into a leafy forest. A found photograph is animated to reconstruct a long past home. If the journeys are ever recurrent, never complete, the ‘homes’ are not portrayed as longed for refuges on arrival, but as uncanny landscapes of their own.
The borderlands between domestic and unfamiliar, native and exotic, homeland and foreignness are blurred, distorted or invented altogether. These works are portraits of the ambiguous space between fiction and reminiscence, between the traveller and the memory of the journey, between home and a half remembered homeland. They all seem an attempt to understand the uncertain distances that escape measurement and definition.
Screening history:
2011
6th May at South Square Gallery, Bradford
Thornton, Bradford, BD13 3LD
www.southsquarecentre.co.uk
12th July at Site Gallery, Sheffield Hosted by Occursus
1 Brown Street, Sheffield, S1 2BS
www.sitegallery.org
occursus.wordpress.com
15th July at Crescent Arts, Scarborough
The Crescent, Scarborough, North Yorkshire, YO11 2PW
www.crescentarts.co.uk
