Past Event
Featuring the London premiere of their provocative new commission Slow Violence, this presentation of four short works by the artist filmmaker duo Kihlberg & Henry explores their visually striking, intellectually rigorous, cross-disciplinary practice.
Followed by a Q&A with the artists and Matthew de Pulford, Curator, Whitstable Biennale.
This event is included in our Thursday Lates offer: book your ticket for the event together with admission for Is This Tomorrow? and save £4.95/£1.50 concs, plus receive a free drink at the Whitechapel Refectory.
Pleasure Through Drowning (2015) 25 minutes
Pleasure Through Drowning follows an impossible attempt to escape a society over-saturated with moving image. Charting a day trip to Portsea Island in search of 32 historic cinemas which existed there during the 20th Century, the narrator describes a desire for moving image to be harnessed, ‘geographically bound once more to these custom-made architectures’. The island is inevitably infected by the visitors who unfold their own flood of images onto the architecture.
A Mountain Close Up is Only Rock (2016) 13 minutes
Mountain Close Up is Only Rock is an archaeology of architect Jørn Utzon’s digital footprint, focusing on the scant online presence of a house he built on Mallorca. Citing Utzon’s distant relationship with the Sydney Opera House, which he never saw complete, and research into brain growth in London taxi drivers while studying The Knowledge, the video treads a thin line between the physical and the digital by asking if one can visit an architecture from a distance.
A Mountain Close Up is Only Rock is co-commissioned by CANVAS and FACT, supported by Artplayer.tv and Channels Festival.
Apeirophobic Framework (2015) 6 minutes excerpt
A staged discussion between the artists takes place in tandem with a series of floating shots of objects and images scattered around their studio. They discuss Apeirophobia, meaning fear of the future or fear of infinity, as a strategy for approaching an event with simultaneous relationship to its past, present and future.
Slow Violence (2018) 30 minutes
To consider images as violent is to consider them as an environmental force that changes its subjects at a pace impossible to capture in a single image, which is where the term Slow Violence originates. Melting together a lecture, an exhibition and the delivery of a manifesto, the work forwards a series of methodologies for dealing with a city which delivers violence as a relentless and glacial barrage of images, images which contradict their violence through their aesthetic contents.
Commissioned by Whitstable Biennale 2018 funded by Arts Council England and the Elephant Trust.
