For the February Now Showing, UK based performance and moving image artist Kathryn Elkin has chosen to screen Sarah Turner’s ‘A Life in a Day with Helena Goldwater’ (UK, 1996, 20mins). Turner’s film imagines a fictional day in the life of a performance artist who doubles as a deck chair attendant.

7pm at The Showroom

Tickets

Sarah Turner is an artist, writer and filmmaker with a rooting in avant-garde cinema. Turner’s recent work focuses on the relationship between the abstract and narrative, exploring the theme of ecology through film. Turner has curated film programmes for the National Film Theatre, LUX Moving Image and the Tate Gallery and is currently a Reader in Fine Art at the University of Kent.

Alongside this, Elkin will be screening recent work ‘Dame 2’, a film which recreates an interview on Parkinson with Helen Mirren from 1975, transcribed and performed as a song by Elkin. She is backed by a choir of associates and friends she corrals into chanting in loose harmony. The work explores the notion of improvisation and power-balance within the recorded-as-live TV format, and re-cites/recites this particular interview, which is so often referenced as an example of historic sexism.

Elkin’s performance and video works concern role-playing and improvising, alongside an ongoing interest in the outtake and clowning on set. The videos often resemble simplified versions of music videos and TV talk shows. Elkin’s works typically manifest through citing a referent – such as an artist, a song, a writer, or performer – upon which she applies personal methods of translation, transcription and representation. She has an ongoing interest in shared cultural memory (as produced by popular music, television and cinema) and the melding of this information to biographical memory. Elkin’s moving image works are distributed by LUX Moving Image.

Cinenova: Now Showing began in March 2015 and runs monthly. The series intends to materialise relationships between contemporary artist moving image practice and the feminist and organising legacies present in the Cinenova collection. Now Showing future invited protagonists include: Jamie Crewe, Onyeka Igwe, Oreet Ashery, Letitia Beatriz, Ayesha Hameed, Olivia Plender, Charlotte Prodger and more to be announced. Past events have been with Noski Deville and Patrick Staff; Kari Roberts and Judith Barry; Nooshin Farhid and Lis Rhodes; Rehana Zaman and Lai Ngan Walsh & the Law Collective; Lucy Clout, Tracey Moffatt and Susan Stein; Cara Tolmie, Kimberley O’Neill and France-Lise McGurn, Judith Barry and Ruth Novaczek; Justice for Domestic Workers and Leeds Animation Co-op; Claire Hope and Judith Barry; Lucy Parker and Adriana Monti; Kate Davis, Margaret Salmon and Sheffield Film Co-op; Richard John Jones and Karen Everett; Grace Schwindt and Kim Longinotto.

A digital archive of selected works from Cinenova distribution is available for viewing at The Showroom. For details on how to view the digital archive follow this link:
http://www.theshowroom.org/projects/cinenova-digital-archive

Image: A Life in a Day with Helena Goldwater by Sarah Turner (UK, 1996, 20 mins).

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