George Clark, On The Planter's Art: An illustrated talk on films, maps and gardening

I am told there are people who do not care for maps, and find it hard to believe; here is an inexhaustible fund of interest for any man with eyes to see or twopence-worth of imagination to understand with! – Robert Louis Stevenson

The map does not reproduce an unconscious closed in upon itself; it constructs the unconscious. – Gilles Deleuze

Artist and curator George Clark will present this illustrated lecture looking at ideas of perspective, categorisation and interpretation in cinema and art. Drawing from research for his ongoing film projects in Hong Kong and Los Angeles, he will present and discuss a diverse range of subjects from the 16mm Kodachome films of Californian gardener Albert Wilson, the history of bird watching and illustration in colonial Hong Kong and the visionary 1980 Centre Pompidou exhibition on cartography Maps and Figures of the Earth/​Cartes et figures de la Terre. Central to the talk is exploration of maps as ​‘instruments of travel and discovery, as well as sophisticated tools to dream.’ The presentation will draw on the writings of Jorge Luis-Borges and Gilles Deleuze, film work by South American emigres in Paris such as Hugo Santiago and David Lamelas and Raul Ruiz’s rare film on maps and labyrinths made to accompany the Pompidou exhibition.

George Clark is an artist and curator. Recent work includes the film A Distant Echo (2016), which explores myth, history, and ecology in the desert, and the film Sea of Clouds /​雲海 (2016), which is structured around an interview with artist Chen Chieh-jen. His solo exhibition A Planter’s Art featured a new series of moving image works installed alongside a specially cultivated garden in Taiwan, and his ongoing project Eyemo Rolls draws on a growing body of 35mm films shown in dialog with other works as means to think about place and entanglement. He has curated projects for museums, galleries, cinemas, and festivals with a focus on broadening the histories of film and video practice globally. Through his work at Tate Modern (2013 – 2015) and in independent projects, he has curated retrospectives of Ute Aurand, Julian Dashper, Lav Diaz, Camille Henrot, Vlado Kristl, Luis Ospina, and Chick Strand, as well as thematic exhibitions on Japanese expanded cinema (with Julian Ross and Go Hirasawa), the L.A. Rebellion, and Infermental, the first magazine on videocassette (with Dan Kidner and James Richards).