Past Event
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About This Event
– This event takes place online only.
– You can access this event for free through this web page and also on the Whitechapel Gallery’s YouTube Channel, here.
– This event is suitable for those over the age of 16.
– We are unable to provide British Sign Language interpretation for this event.
– We are unable to provide live closed captioning or CART for this event.
– As the event is scheduled for a total of one hour, we will not take a rest break.
– As the event is being live streamed, you can access it from your home if you have access to an internet connection.
– We do not yet know if we will be able to make the recording available afterwards.
This information will be updated where required.
29 April – 7 May 2021
Two striking new artists’ feature length essay films – Joshua Bonnetta‘s The Two Sights and Huw Wahl‘s The Republics – engage in multisensory ways with the waterlands of the Outer Hebrides. The latter also follows its protagonist, poet Stephen Watts, back to the banks of the Thames near his home in Shadwell. Wahl and Watts will be in conversation about place, poetry, sound and storytelling alongside a screening of Walh’s work.
Find out more about The Republics here and The Two Sights here.
This event is part of our season Ways of Knowing: Water / Fluidity.
Joshua Bonnetta (b. Canada 1979) is an interdisciplinary artist working with sound and image across installation, performance, and traditional cinema exhibition.
His work has been shown at The Berlinale, BFI London Film Festival, Institute of Contemporary Art (London), Museum of Modern Art (New York), New York Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival, Whitechapel Gallery, and at various festivals, museums, and galleries internationally. His work has been written about in Art Forum, Frieze, Sight & Sound, Cinemascope, The Guardian, and the New York Times.
He is an Associate Professor in the Department of Cinema, Photography, & Media Art at Ithaca College. His sound works are published by Shelter Press, Canti Magnetici, and Senufo Editions.
Huw Wahl is an artist filmmaker born in London in 1985. His award winning work has been screened internationally, featured in magazines Sight and Sound and The Wire, and received funding from organisations such as The Henry Moore Foundation, ACE, and the RPS. His film Everything Lives: looking at the artist as father (2016) screened at Open City Docs and was selected for the Future Shorts summer programme. Action Space (2016) won Prix Filaf d’Argent at FILAF film festival and the inflatable made as part of the film travelled to various places for screening and filming events, such as Flatpack Film Festival and Chelsea School of Arts in London. His first film To Hell With Culture (2014), about the poet, writer and anarchist Sir Herbert Read premiered at the ICA and numerous film festivals such as DOKU.ARTS in Berlin. He has also written in academic journals, magazines, given papers at conferences, and taught short film and photography courses in university and community settings.
Stephen Watts is a poet and translator. He feels poetry as energy and breath, as body and spirit. Recent books of his own include Ancient Sunlight (Enitharmon 2014) & Republic Of Dogs / Republic Of Birds (Test Centre 2017). Prototype plan to publish his Collected Poems starting in 2022. Among recent co-translations are Adnan al-Sayegh’s Pages From The Diary Of An Exile (Arc Publications 2016) & Golan Haji’s A Tree Whose Name I Don’t Know (A Midsummer Night’s Press 2017). Lemon Sun by Ziba Karbassi is forthcoming in 2020. His mother’s family are from the Italian Alps (his grandfather was a shepherd: poets are shepherds of words!) & he himself quit university and went to look after sheep on North Uist where he began to write poetry. Since 1977 he has lived mostly in Whitechapel, working as a poet in schools, hospitals & drop-in centres and in situations of shared language & health & well-being. He researches international poetries.
