Grierson Award nominated film Public House which premiered in October 2015 at the BFI London Film Festival, and is directed by award-winning artist Sarah Turner, Reader in Fine Art and Director of Research in the School of Music and Fine Art, is being screened at Tate Britain in 11 July, http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-britain/film/co-op-dialogues-1966-2016-william-raban-and-sarah-turner

It is also previewing in the Changing London forum at the ICA on July 12, https://www.ica.org.uk/whats-on/changing-london-public-house-qa-director,

Both events are followed by a Q & A conversation with the Director.

This genre-blending documentary of spoken word / text/ opera/ film was funded by a production award from Film London Artists’ Moving Image Network (FLAMIN) and a research award from the School of Music and Fine Art, University of Kent.

Additionally, Public House will be screening at 8pm on Sunday 21 August 2016 in Hackney Wick as part of The Floating Cinema’s summer programme, Another Country. The film will be the closing feature film of the Hackney Wick weekender, which explores how, as the city gentrifies at a giddying rate, new spaces are appearing and old ones are fading away. More info here: http://floatingcinema.info/events/2016/another-country

To view Sarah’s talk about Public House click here: https://vimeo.com/137493399

To find out more about Public House see this related post: https://www.kent.ac.uk/smfa/news.html?view=1722

School of Music and Fine Art Reader Shona Illingworth is among the 6 artists shortlisted for the Jarman Award 2016, with her work Westbound, which explores ideas of human emotion and memory.

The £10,000 art prize, named after Kent based artist and film-maker Derek Jarman, who died in 1994, is in its ninth year, and honours UK artists working with film, video and moving image in all its forms and keeping Jarman’s “spirit of experimentation, imagination and innovation” alive. The work of this year’s nominees spans short films, animations, YouTube collages and multi-screen installations.  All six shortlisted artists will be commissioned to produce new work for Channel 4’s short film series Random Acts and their art will tour 11 galleries around the UK.

Artist Shona Illingworth is Director of Graduate Studies in the School of Music and Fine Art.  She  works across sound, film, video, photography, drawing and painting. Major works using moving image and/or sound, take the form of gallery based and site specific installation. Her work combines interdisciplinary research (particularly with emerging neuropsychological models of memory and critical approaches to memory studies) with publicly engaged practice. Her work has been exhibited widely, including at the Museum of Modern Art, Bologna, the Wellcome Collection, London, the National Museum, Tirana and Interaccess Electronic Media Arts Centre, Toronto and she has received high profile commissions from Film and Video Umbrella, the Hayward Gallery, London and Channel 4 Television.

For more information click https://www.kent.ac.uk/smfa/staff/staff-profiles/school/4Illingworth.html

For a short extract from Westbound click here: https://vimeo.com/167875207

For further info see: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2016/jun/17/women-film-makers-dominate-jarman-award-shortlist-for-2016

Organised by Fundraising UK Ltd and hosted by the University of Kent’s School of Music & Fine Art, this event for Arts Fundraisers on Thursday, 14 July, 2016 is a fantastic opportunity for local and regional arts professionals and fundraisers to learn, share good practice and network. Despite the name, there are no tents involved!  A Fundraising Camp is a one-day ‘unconference’-style event for fundraisers: there are no set speakers and no set topics. Each participant is invited to suggest a topic at the beginning of the day. Local fundraising, business, philanthropy or grant making experts are invited to share practical fundraising knowledge and experience.

Find more info here: http://www.kent.ac.uk/smfa/events.html?eid=18365&view_by=month&date=20160724&category=&tag=

There will be a limited number of FREE places for University of Kent staff, students and alumni. Please contact j.seaman@kent.ac.uk for details.

Venue: The Historic Dockyard Chatham. 
Times: 9.30am-4pm

Booking link:http://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/fundraising-camp-arts-registration-21486231898

Early bird tickets are just £30+VAT for charities, voluntary organisations and social enterprises.

Whitstable artist and School of Music and Fine Art Lecturer, Adam Chodzko, has stunning work featured in the exhibition Stories in the Dark, curated by artist Ben Judd. The exhibition is a co-commission by The Beaney House of Art & Knowledge and Whitstable Biennale, a festival of contemporary art.  (The exhibition is also part of the programme of the University of Kent’s International Festival of Projections, which ran 18 to 20 March 2016.)

Using rare, original magic lantern machines, projection devices invented in the 17th century that used the light of candles and oil lamps to produce shows that projected moving images for the very first time, and beautiful Victorian slides, this unique exhibition by artists Ben Judd, Jordan Baseman, Benedict Drew, Louisa Fairclough, Dryden Goodwin, Haroon Mirza, Lindsay Seers and Guy Sherwin, creates new work especially for The Beaney.

Adam Chodzko stuns us with images of dust ‘explosions’ in his work Ask The Dust, whilst his second work Mask Filter Arc he then combines the Beaney’s Venus Flower Basket with two magic lantern slides, creating a lantern whose intense flashes of light remind us of the process of inspiration and expiration, ugliness and beauty.

Says Adam about Ask the Dust: “A slide projector back-projects ‘images’ of dust ‘explosions’ onto a blind in the Explorers and Collectors gallery,sharing this ‘screen’ with moving patches of sunlight, channelled by a large arched window. The dust silhouettes are formed by tiny particles of debris, decay collected from the barrel of a cannon (captured from the Chinese during the Second Opium War, 1860) stored in the Beaney’s archives. Their apparently random arrangements, suspended in 35mm film slide mounts, now magnified, offer the possibility of being decoded and read, like tea leaves, as premonitions. Or perhaps as the animated frames from a recording of Chinese shadow puppet performance.”

The exhibition runs until Sunday 19 June.

Location: Special Exhibitions Room, The Beaney, 18 High Street, Canterbury, CT1 2BD

More info here: http://canterburymuseums.co.uk/events/stories-in-the-dark/

An innovative collaborative project organised by the School of Music and Fine Art in partnership with Whitstable Biennale has proved to be a huge success. The recent walk on 21 March with artist Mike Nelson quickly became fully booked, attracting over 40 people, including curators from Tate Modern and the Whitechapel, a curator of the Architecture Biennial in Venice, filmmakers, writers, poets, artists and students.

Says Adam Chodzko, Senior Lecturer in Fine Art in The School of Music & Fine Art and one of the organisers: “Mike Nelson is one of the UK’s most important artists. Twice nominated for the Turner Prize and previously representing Britain at the Venice Biennale, it was his dislike of public speaking that led to us developing this different approach (walking) in order to develop a different kind of discourse between students and artists and place.”

The 4 walks aim to test the proposition that a walking journey with an artist is as valuable as hearing them address a lecture theatre, and that sharing a range of sights and sounds would reveal something that slides and video clips do not.  Each route culminates at a point along the Medway estuary or river Swale, forming a string of reference points between which the connections between the walks can be contemplated.

For images from the walk go to: http://mikenelsonartistwalk.tumblr.com/

The final walk with Brian Dillon is on 9 April. For more details of the walks go to: www.whitstablebiennale.com

School of Music & Fine Art Lecturers Tim Meacham and Adam Chodzko are 2 of the artists featured in Uncommon Chemistry, which runs from 20 March – 17 April at The Observer Buildings, Hastings.

Curated by Dan Howard-Birt, the exhibition explores the parallel artistic leitmotifs of material agency and arcane spirituality, and how the conscious engagement with one or other of these territories provides valuable analogies for the broader understanding of art-making and art-viewing.

There is always something which lurks beyond the artist’s control, which brings a work to life and enables it to mutate and evolve through different contexts of time and place.

Visit the Facebook event for more information: https://www.facebook.com/events/221838461501852/  or go to http://observerbuildinghastings.co.uk/whats-next/

The exhibition is FREE to attend.