Undercurrents 10 - Available Light
In the presence of Morgan Quaintance
Presented in collaboration with Outlands
Courtisane is een platform voor film en audiovisuele kunsten. In de vorm van een jaarlijks festival, filmvertoningen, gesprekken en publicaties onderzoeken we de relaties tussen beeld en wereld, esthetiek en politiek, experiment en engagement.
Courtisane is a platform for film and audiovisual arts. Through a yearly festival, film screenings, talks and publications, we research the relations between image and world, aesthetics and politics, experiment and engagement.
In the presence of Morgan Quaintance
Presented in collaboration with Outlands
Available Light is a new touring commission devised by London based artist, writer and musician, Morgan Quaintance. Presented by Outlands Network, this year-long expanded exhibition explores notions of home and belonging in contemporary society. Expanding from themes in an eponymously titled new film work that comprises interviews with workers at the Edo Tokyo Open Air Architecture Museum in Tokyo, and fragments of conversations with renters in that city and London.
Available Light also includes new formal and conceptual elements, writing, and sound compositions developed by Quaintance. This core body of new work is placed in a changing configuration alongside other contributions —music, spoken word and moving image —from a range of invited artists. At Courtisane, the programme will be dispersed across the interior space of Minard.
Georgian born and London-based artist and filmmaker Sophio Medoidze will present readings and images from her new monograph Bastard Sun, a book featuring a collection of photographs taken after the civil unrest in Georgia in the 1990s.
The duo of Japan-born and London-based filmmaker Chiemi Shimada and British composer Jamie Man will present the performance Celestial Palpitations, a new work for recorded voice, analogue slide projector and electronics.
A group of musicians including Daniel Smith (guitar), Benjin (strings), Millips (samples and electronics) and Pharaoh Russell (drums) will perform live, playing new compositions by Quaintance and improvisations throughout the programme.
Developing a bespoke touring format for Available Light, Quaintance questions the traditions of exhibition and presentation; refusing the monographic focus of the solo-show, resisting the ‘one-shot’ logic of the film screening, and the ‘same show, different town’ conventions of touring theatre or music production. Across a series of dates in the UK and Europe, rather than adhering to the cookie-cutter demands of the touring circuit, Available Light accommodates collaboration and contingency in a format defined by the changing contours of an active artist practice.