ARCHITECTURAL ASSOCIATION

Artist’s Series (supported by the London Consortium)

Organised by Parveen Adams

Friday 27th February

Jane and Louise Wilson

have worked together for the last twenty years. Their multi-part video installations are notable for their handling of the viewer’s relation to the spaces as the artists have experienced them - Stasi City (1997), Gamma (1999), Erehwon (2000) among many others. Their most recent work, Unfolding the Aryan Papers (2009) is currently at the British Film Institute’s Southbank Gallery. It is based on unmade Kubrick film concerning a wartime story of a Jewish woman. The actress who was to have played the lead herself figures large in the Wilsons’ film which also includes Kubrick’s wardrobe stills and wartime newsreel images - a complex and stunning work.

Friday 6th March

Melik Ohanian

is a French-Armenian artist working in Paris. In 2006 he showed in South London Gallery - Invisible Film (2005) along with Seven Minutes Before. The latter is an experiment with narrative structure which involves seven screens with seven films taken across two kilometres of a French valley floor which culminate in a single dramatic explosion. In the same year the Institut d’Art Contemporain put their entire space at his disposal. His work has been described as ‘among the most intriguing forms of creative work to be seen at the present day’ (J-L Maubant). Among many projects this year is a group show entitled The Times of a Place in Spain.

Friday 13th March

Matt Collishaw

Haunch of Venison show (2008) - a marvel - Böcklin’s Island of the Dead animated by light changes during the course of a day and projected onto a two-way mirror with complex effects - the viewer held as much by the sheer beauty of the piece as the need to work out how it worked. Shooting Stars projected images of children (from old and new photographs) onto the walls of a huge room in a series of fleeting flashes that might appear anywhere. What were we seeing and why were we seeing it this way? Throbbing Gristle, a large mesmerising sculpture with human and mythological figures, animals and birds constructed like a merry-go-round that rotated with accompanying strobe lighting which conjured up a fearful yet compulsive scene of Chapmanesque excess.

Friday 20th March

Mary Kelly

has shown her work round the world and it is included in major collections. Working in London in the 1970s she incorporated her feminist concerns in the landmark five-part Post-Partum Document. This was followed by a complete showing of the four-part Interim at the New Museum in New York in 1990. She then developed a powerful technique utilising the lint screen of a clothes-dryer by which she produced curved grey mini pads of lint. She has used these to great effect in a series of works in the nineties. She will speak about her recent work including her part in Documenta 2007.

All sessions are 6.30-8.00 at the AA, 34-36 Bedford Square, WC1

Mark Cousins 5.00 lectures Distructure of Cities - on the above dates