ALICE ANDERSON

Alice Anderson uses her triple cultural background (French, Algerian and British) to create Art based on her fictional childhood memories. Working from sculpture to film, she presents Time as her most significant working material. Memory is shown as the ‘master of fiction’ as she plays with the dislocation of time in the same way that children construct parallel worlds. Her work triggers certain recollections reinventing memories of her childhood. For Smoke on the Water, Anderson will create a lattice made from dolls hair, a spider’s web reminiscent of an empty house. Alice Anderson's WEB sculpture is a response to her Fictional Childhood Memories performances started in 2010 in which she replays her rituals made at her six-year- old self. “I remember the terrible fears I used to have as a child left alone at home for many long hours waiting for the return of my mother. At that time I invented rituals to calm my anxieties and to ward off the fact that Time was an intangible. These rituals consisted of attaching parts of my body and objects after undoing seams. This obsession became so bad that later I started to the same thing using her hair.” 

Alice Anderson (b 1976) studied with Christian Boltanski at L'Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Paris, and graduated from Goldsmiths College, London, where she lives and works. In 2010 her work was exhibited at Tate Modern London, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, Nichido Contemporary Art, Tokyo, Riso Art Museum, Sicily, National Taiwan Museum, Taipei, Fondation Agnes b, Paris, Cinémathèque Française, Paris, Busan Biennale, South Korea, and Riflemaker, London 

HARALD HUND AND PAUL HORN 

Hund & Horn Paul Horn & Harald Hund have been working together for a number of years on several film and video projects and exhibitions, complementing each other in their respective areas of work and interests as far as new approaches to filmmaking are concerned. Hund & Horn began working together in the mid-1990s and intensified their co- operation when they shot their film Tomatoheads in 2001. 

On show in SMOKE ON THE WATER are their videos Dropping Furniture and Tomatoheads which both belong to Hund & Horn’s Gravity Trilogy. Tomatoheads is based on a trick which H&H want the audience to discover for themselves. Dropping Furniture stands as a metaphor for the loss of a human existence. The film passes before the viewer’s eyes as a (bad) dream in slow motion, depicting the destruction of an apartment. Viewers have compared it to the anarchic humour of Laurel and Hardy, or to the kind of vandalism sometimes perpetrated by rock stars in hotel rooms.

The third part of the trilogy will be Apnea (planned shooting January 2011) which so far exists as a preliminary shooting. The film shows the ‘normal’ everyday existence of a family, only that they live under water. Similarly to Tomatoheads, the idea behind the film is to reduce the notion of ‘normality’ to absurdity. H & H have shown their works in a wide variety of exhibitions and film festivalS.

BRUNO MARTELLI & RUTH GIBSON igloo

Based in London, the artists Ruth Gibson and Bruno Martelli work together and often as igloo. Their practice is multifaceted ranging through installation, intervention, virtualisation, film and performance drawing on the multiple layers of reality and unreality. Much of their work is in recreating environments and systems where coding joins hands with choreographies of the body. Their core concept is the intersection between technology and the human spirit, where our ambivalence to technology is explored with originality, humour and intellect. 

Over the past ten years igloo has carried out a wide range of practice-based research in order to develop new & experimental multi-media projects for public presentation. Whilst the artistic rationale for the content of these projects has remained constant, the requirement to research and experiment in order to keep pace with new technological opportunities has led igloo to evolve creative, distinctive and highly disciplined models for collaboration with a wide and distinguished range of professionals supporting research and production of new works. 

Research areas include the use of animation tools and digital methods to explore and realise unique approaches in developing real-time screen based works. The creative expansion of interface development into new territories evolving science and new display technologies.  Their recent group and solo exhibitions include ISEA, 52nd Venice Biennale, Sara Meltzer Gallery, New York, V22 London, Wharf Road, London. Their recent residencies include RMIT Australia, ArtSway, UK &; Banff, Canada. 

Links

www.igloo.org.uk

www.swanquake.com

www.sensoryinstallations.com

PAUL O'KANE 

Paul O’Kane is an artist, writer and tutor based in London. In his visual practice he has become increasingly passionate about the photographic, filmed and scanned image. Paul cultivates over a 30-year archive of his own images, allowing a kind of casino mechanism to throw up anachronisms that speak to the present at fortuitous moments. The photographic image’s emotive invocation of shared time or history has its own history which Paul O’Kane sees as a conversation between various notions of the real, technology and materiality. HD today may be fetishised for its hyperreality yet it is a more extreme mediation than e.g. a glass plate negative which can crack. We can therefore be impressed by the real as a proximity or as a distance and this is part of what the photographic, film and scanned image continues to teach us. 

Paul O’Kane’s visual practice has become increasingly curious about the photographic, the filmed and the scanned image. Paul has cultivated an archive of his own images, allowing a kind of casino mechanism to throw up anachronisms that speak to the present at fortuitous moments. For Smoke on the Water, O’Kane’s 25 minute ‘real time’ video projection, Carousel, of a circus carousel shutting down for the night, is melancholic and poignant, with its low resolution replicates the CCTV aesthetic, both referencing and frustrating its voyeuristic tendency.