THIS OUR STILL LIFE – Andrew and Eden Kötting

University of Brighton Gallery
South Gallery, FREE ENTRY
Private View 16 November
Open 17 November – 3 December
Weekdays 10.00am – 8.00pm
Saturday 10.00am – 5.00pm, closed Sunday.

A portrait of a tumbledown Pyrenean farmhouse through the eyes and ears of a family that have lived there on and off for the last 22 years. Film, paintings, drawings, texts and ephemera explore themes of Still-Life, isolation and the animistic nature of the great outdoors.

At the heart of the exhibition is Andrew Kötting’s new film, a home movie that builds into a moving, warm and intimate place and person portrait. Focusing on Andrew and Leila’s daughter Eden who featured in Kötting’s GALLIVANT (1996) touring the coastline of the UK with her father and ‘Big Granny’, we first see the family in France with Eden just a baby. As the seasons ebb and flow around her Eden is shown painting still lifes and singing along to the radio. (enjoying her gloriously idiosyncratic existence). With music from Scanner and a whole plethora of cut-ups and voices from the film-maker’s sound archive, THIS OUR STILL LIFE exudes an evocative charge of melancholia and nostalgia.

“Kötting understands instinctively that, in these unsettling and transformative times, the local in both heart and hearth needs to be radically re-imagined as the prime locus of our needs and search for belonging.” Gareth Evans.

‘The genius of Andrew Kötting is to marry Stan Brakhage and Benny Hill: heart-rending visionary intensity with lurching human comedy, funny voices, speeding physicality. An authentic poem to place, in and of wild nature. Panoramic and intimate. And wholly absorbing.” Iain Sinclair.

SOFT PALATE – MARTIN ARNOLD

University of Brighton Gallery

North Gallery, FREE ENTRY
Open 17 November – 1 December
Weekdays 10.00am – 8.00pm
Saturday 10.00am – 5.00pm, closed Sunday.

Austrian film-maker Martin Arnold directs his deconstructive impulses – with a darkly humorous twist – to the heritage of Walt Disney.

SOFT PALATE is a neurotic re-animation of Mickey Mouse and Pluto that comes to life as Mickey’s sleeping body rhythmically builds out of the darkness one body part at a time.
Martin Arnold is renowned for his radical re-imagining of tiny sections of Hollywood movies. In films such as Pièce touchée (1990) Passage à l’acte (1993) and Alone. Life Wastes Andy Hardy (2001) the intense repetition and subtle variations evoke surprising nuances and create new meanings.

“The cinema of Hollywood is a cinema of exclusion, reduction and denial, a cinema of repression. In consequence we should not only consider what is shown, but also that which is not shown. There is always something behind that which is being represented, which was not represented. And it is exactly that which is most interesting to consider.” Martin Arnold

Courtesy Galerie Martin Janda

PRACTICAL ELECTRONICA EXHIBITION

Phoenix Brighton
19 November – 18 December
Open Wed – Sun, 11am – 5pm

An exhibition exploring some of the fascinating material from
Ian Helliwell’s new documentary film on early electronic music
innovator, F.C. Judd.

Experimental sounds, tapes, books, magazines, collages -
televisions and tone generators – old equipment customised
by Helliwell, and applied to present day music and filmmaking.

Alongside a collection of Fred Juddrabilia, visitors can see
their voice patterns on a modified TV, make sounds with the
Hellimatic, and gain a perspective on early and contemporary
electronic music.

DARK GARDEN

Sat 3 December 11am – 6pm
Lighthouse, FREE ENTRY

Nick Collins. UK 2011. 81/2 mins

The film-maker’s garden in winter: skeletal and silvery plants and their supports are conjured out of the black of the screen as a series of filmic epiphanies.

The film shot on 16mm film, is eight-and-a-half minutes long and silent. It will be screened every 15mins throughout the day.