John Smith Film Programme

A larger-than-life portrait of the late Queen’s husband, His Royal Highness the Duke of Edinburgh, recorded at the University of East London in 2002. Filmed with a closely cropped angle of the duke’s face and head, the film sat on the artist’s shelf for 19 years until the video was eventually completed on the day of Prince Philip’s death on the 9 April 2021. 

The film alternates between conventional storytelling and visual abstraction, incorporating colour fields that slowly transform into representational images. The Black Tower builds a psychological bond between narrator and viewer, while repeatedly disrupting illusion by foregrounding its own construction. An offscreen voice introduces a man haunted by a tower that seems to follow him around London. Both humorous and unsettling, the narrative steadily escalates into a horror-like scenario in which the protagonist loses the ability to distinguish between reality and the paranormal. Blending elements of psychological horror, dark humour, and structural film, the 24-minute piece explores themes of urban alienation, human perception, and madness through a meticulously controlled layout of images and sound.  

Blight was made in collaboration with the composer Jocelyn Pook. It revolves around the building of the M11 Link Road in East London, which provoked a long and bitter campaign by residents to protect their homes from demolition. The images in the film record some of the changes which occurred in the area over a two-year period, from the demolition of houses through to the start of motorway building work. The soundtrack incorporates natural sounds associated with these events together with speech fragments taken from recorded conversations with local people. Addressing themes of memory and loss, the film constructs stories from unconnected fragments of sound and image, bringing disparate reminiscences and contemporary events together. Blight exploits the ambiguities of its material to produce new meanings and metaphors, fictionalizing reality through framing and editing strategies.  

Dad’s Stick features three well-used objects that were shown to the artist by his father before he shortly died. Smith pays homage to his late father by showcasing these personal tools to examine the texture of memory and the things people leave behind. One of these objects is a stick used to stir paint that has had its end cut off to reveal a tree-ring like structure of many layers, a time capsule of over fifty years of personal history. Another of these objects is a heavily encrusted metal paint-mixing cup which looks like a seashell but is buried in layers and decades of paint that its original function becomes obscured. Focusing on these ambiguous artefacts and events relating to history, Dad’s Stick creates a dialogue between abstraction and literal meaning, exploring the contradictors of memory and hint at the character of a ‘perfectionist with a steady hand’. 

Self-isolating at home in Hackney during the COVID-19 lockdown, Smith stands in front of a mirror, singing ‘Happy Birthday’ in a sombre end elegiac tone as he washes his hands. Cutting to clips of the then-Prime Minster Boris Johnson who advises that doing this very act will contain the spread of the coronavirus he then ends the video concisely. Listing the current number of deaths, Smith juxtaposes the Prime Minister’s casual “go about business as usual’ advice with the devastating reality of the soaring COVID-19 death toll occurring simultaneously in Britain. 

Made in collaboration with Graeme Miller. 

Lost Sound (1998-2001) links together static shots featuring the streets of East London. What at first seems like a straightforward documentary episode of urban life emerges as a complex, intricate discourse between environment and viewer. Divided by neighbourhoods, each chapter of Lost Sound weaves establishing shots of each street with their ambient sound, alongside occasional insertions of the recovered tape music found on site. In collaboration with sound artist Graeme Mille, Smith populates his film with the fragments of discarded audio tape woven into the fabric of the street – winding around iron clad fences, nestled in patches of grass, lying in gutter-water puddles. Locating these neglected and forgotten audio fragments, Smith and Mille then re-record the audio data, playing it back at intervals within the film. ‘Lost Sound depicts the city as a disparate and fragmented series of personal histories.  A sense of migration, loss and displacement seeps through upbeat soundtracks from sunnier climes’ – Helen Legg, exhibition ‘John Smith’, Ikon Gallery, Birmingham 2006.  

John Smith was born in Walthamstow, London in 1952 and lives and works in London. Smith studied at North-East London Polytechnic and the Royal College of Art, after which he became an active member of the London Filmmakers Co-op. Inspired in his formative years by conceptual art and structural film, but also fascinated by the immersive power of narrative and the spoken word, he has developed an extensive body of work that subverts perceived boundaries between documentary and fiction, representation and abstraction.

Since 1972 Smith has made over 60 film, video and installation works that have been shown in galleries and independent cinemas around the world with major prizes at many international film festivals. Retrospectives of his films have been presented at film festivals in 16 countries. He received a Paul Hamlyn Foundation Award for Artists in 2011 and in 2013 he was the winner of Film London’s Jarman Award. In 2026 his film ’Being John Smith’ was a finalist for the European Film Academy Short Film Award.

Institutional solo exhibitions include Secession, Vienna (2025); Kunstmuseum Magdeburg (2022); Museum of Contemporary Art, Leipzig (2015); Centre d’Art Contemporain de Noisy-le-Sec, Paris (2014); Kestnergesellschaft, Hanover (2012); Weserburg Museum of Modern Art, Bremen (2012); Turner Contemporary, Margate (2012); Uppsala Art Museum (2011); Royal College of Art Galleries, London (2010) and Ikon Gallery, Birmingham (2006).

Recent group exhibitions include ‘Ways of Seing’, Muzeum Sztuki, Lodz (2025, ongoing); ‘Life After Life’, 15th Kaunas Biennial, Lithuania (2025); ‘We Saw an Endless Cycle’, Hayy Jameel, Jedda (2024); ‘Walk This Way’, Kunstmuseum Ravensburg (2024); ‘Small World: 13th Taipei Biennial’ (2023); ‘Life Is More Important Than Art, That’s Why Art Is Important’, Whitechapel Gallery, London (2023); ‘Street Life’, Wilhelm-Hack-Museum, Ludwigshafen am Rhein, Germany (2022); ‘Instantly! Vienna Street Photography’, Museen der Stadt Wien, Vienna (2022); ‘Atlas of Modernity: Exercises’, Muzeum Sztuki, Lodz (2021); ‘Le Cours des Choses’, Musee d’Art Contemporain de Bordeaux (2020); ‘Migrating Worlds: The Art of the Moving Image in Britain’, Yale Centre for British Art, Connecticut (2019).

John Smith’s films are in the public collections of Tate, Arts Council England, Museum of Modern Art New York, FRAC Île de France, Kunstmuseum Magdeburg, Ville de Genève and Muzeum Sztuki, Lodz. He lives and works in Hackney and is Emeritus Professor of Fine Art at University of East London.