Events

Miraculous Noise: Artists’ Moving Image from Glasgow

11 March — 11 April 2021

Online & outdoor
Viborg Kunsthal
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Duncan Marquiss, Evolutionary Jerks & Gradualist Creeps, 2016. Courtesy of the artist.

Miraculous Noise is programme of artists’ moving image work from Glasgow that explores the connection between sound and image, and the broader relationship between visual arts and music.

Curated by LUX Scotland for Viborg Kunsthal in Denmark, Miraculous Noise takes inspiration from Glasgow and Viborg’s relationship as part of the UNESCO Creative Cities Network. The programme provides an introduction to a range of work by both emerging and established artists based in Glasgow, all of whom have an ongoing engagement in music and sound.

Screening both outdoors and online, Miraculous Noise comprises a programme of nine short films which are presented alongside three longer works. The films have been captioned by Collective Text, Matchbox Cineclub and Valery Tough. The exhibition is supported by the Statens Kunstfond and the Obel Family Foundation.

Including work by: Anne-Marie Copestake, Jamie Crewe, Sarah Forrest, Luke Fowler, Ashanti Harris, Florrie James, Wendy Kirkup & Richy Carey, Adam Lewis Jacob, Duncan Marquiss, Christian Noelle Charles & Matthew Arthur Williams, and Alberta Whittle.

View the exhibition online via Eventive here.

Daily projection times at Viborg Kunsthal

19.00:Wendy Kirkup & Richy Carey, The Forest of Everything, 2019. HD video, 5 min.

19.06:Sarah Forrest, Recital, 2016. HD video, 5 min 27 sec.A PDF with sound descriptions can be downloaded here.

19.12:Anne-Marie Copestake, A love, 2019. 16mm transferred to HD video, 16 min 30 sec.

19.29:Ashanti Harris, Elizabeth Junor, 2019. HD video, 4 min 7 sec.

19.34:Duncan Marquiss, Midgie Noise, 2008. SD video, 2 min 20 sec.

19.37:Florrie James, Palm Tree, 2020. 16mm transferred to HD video, 3 min 06 sec.

19.41:Adam Lewis Jacob, People Meeting in a Room, 2019. HD video, 18 min 6 sec.

20.00:Christian Noelle Charles & Matthew Arthur Williams, PR 4 US, 2020. HD video, 4 min.

20.05:Jamie Crewe, The Ideal Bar” – Le Narcisse” – Alec’s”, 2020. HD video, 4 min.

20.10:Luke Fowler, Patrick, 2020. 16mm transferred to HD video, 21 min.

20.32:Duncan Marquiss, Evolutionary Jerks & Gradualist Creeps, 2016. HD video, 38 min 7 sec.

21.11:Alberta Whittle, between a whisper and a cry, 2019. HD video, 41 min.

Wendy Kirkup & Richy Carey, The Forest of Everything, 2019

The Forest of Everything is about collaborating, playing and knowing. Influenced by the Oracadian filmmaker and poet Margaret Tait, artist Wendy Kirkup, composer Richy Carey and a group of children played with the materials around them; light, water, air, earth and trees, to rediscover how we move, make, look and listen. The images and soundtrack are made from the children’s own recordings of their surroundings.

Sarah Forrest, Recital, 2016

Recital is set in those first strange moments of waking up, where certainty and strangeness run in parallel as the mind tries to make sense of what is happening. The fast, complex and unpredictable edit follows the rhythm of an improvised Led Zeppelin drum solo which Forrest tried to teach herself. This relationship between intuition and acquired knowledge becomes the focus of the piece.

Anne-Marie Copestake, A love, 2019

A love forms an approach to local history unfolding in the artist’s home neighbourhood. The film foregrounds quiet and tender engagement, respect, various forms of love, presence, absence, and ritual. Developed from exploratory research into young death, premature infant death, A love considers ideas around individual and collective loss, grief and value, the desire for recognition of a life and the necessity for communal recognition.

Ashanti Harris, Elizabeth Junor, 2019

Elizabeth Junor is a document of research into the historical relationship between Guyana and Scotland and the hidden legacies of a black female diaspora. Through a speculative history and translating from archival materials, the film elaborates on the life of Elizabeth Junor (born 1804) between Essequibo in Guyana and the Black Isle in Scotland. The work deploys voice over, superimposition, frames within frames and onscreen text to highlight the modes of narration by which a life is catalogued.

Duncan Marquiss, Midgie Noise, 2008

Midgie Noise is a mesmeric visual of Scotland’s native midgies. Duncan Marquiss’ work often explores overlaps between the cultural and the biological, and this short piece provides an introduction to some of the ideas he examines more comprehensively in his more recent work.

Florrie James, Palm Tree, 2020

Hawthorn, a quiet teenage boy with all the correlating tender attributes, lives in a village on the West Coast of Scotland. The mournful landscapes and whistling wind are interrupted by the blasting dystopic industrial rhythms from Glasgow band, The Modern Institute. The score mirrors Hawthorn’s defeated ego in his desperate love for a returning friend, Magnolia. Sorrowful and deeply felt, Hawthorn’s lovesickness is Romanticist in colour.

Adam Lewis Jacob, People Meeting in a Room, 2019

People Meeting in a Room reflects on collective filmmaking and workers activism. Developed over a year, it connects the histories of activists and filmmakers associated with the Birmingham Trade Union Resource Centre in the 1980s with a group of contemporary collaborators. The contributors interpret archival films and collective actions through animation, performance and conversation.

Christian Noelle Charles & Matthew Arthur Williams, PR 4 US, 2020

PR 4 US focuses on the specific yet regular occurrence for black females of experiencing unwanted approaches in nightclubs and offers a parody of the situation which reverses the power dynamic and reclaims the agency. The work includes a soundtrack by a number of Glasgow based performers.

Jamie Crewe, The Ideal Bar” – Le Narcisse” – Alec’s”, 2020

The Ideal Bar” – Le Narcisse” – Alec’s” is a dramatised exchange between two characters in a Glasgow nightclub. It is inspired by a sequence in The Well of Loneliness by Radclyffe Hall in which the central character encounters a repellent reflection of herself in a Parisian gay bar. The two characters are portrayed by performance maker and ogre Sorcha Clelland, and performance artist and music producer TAAHLIAH.

Luke Fowler, Patrick, 2020

Patrick is made entirely from 16mm film and sound recordings produced during a residency at Headlands Centre for the arts, Marin County, California. The film focuses on the life and work of Patrick Cowley; a singular producer of dance music who pioneered the hi-NRG San Francisco Sound” in the late 1970s. Patrick deploys the methodology of polyvalent editing to create a textured and intimate portrait of Cowley’s brief yet intensely creative life.

Duncan Marquiss, Evolutionary Jerks & Gradualist Creeps, 2016

Evolutionary Jerks & Gradualist Creeps sees two evolutionary biologists, Niles Eldredge and Armand Marie Leroi, consider the analogies and differences between the cultural and the biological realms, by comparing the history of life within the fossil record with the evolution of pop music. Marquiss draws on Eldredge’s pattern of evolution (Punctuated Equilibria) as a cue for image-making processes and editing structures to transpose scientific enquiry into cultural production.

Alberta Whittle, between a whisper and a cry, 2018

between a whisper and a cry seeks to challenge conditions of racialised abjection and find new methods for refusal. Combining the sonic cosmologies found in Kamau Brathwaite’s research on tidalectics with Christina Sharpe’s work on the weather’, the work speaks of memory, trauma, and tensions between land, sea and weather, to reveal the precarity and privilege of geography.