DWOSKINO
Saturday, 15 January 2022
Image: HEVN, P Staff, 2021
World premiere of three newly commissioned artists' films inspired by the life and work of boundary-pushing experimental filmmaker Stephen Dwoskin (1939-2012). Rather than films about Dwoskin these new works take creative inspiration from his work and the themes he explored throughout his life of masculinity, sexuality, disability, illness, pain/pleasure, voyeurism, movement and desire.
The films are commissioned by LUX and the University of Reading as part of the Legacies of Stephen Dwoskin, a three year research project supported by the AHRC.
This event also launches DWOSKINO. The Gaze of Stephen Dwoskin, a new book visually documenting the filmmaker’s life and work edited by Rachel Garfield and Henry K Miller.
The Dwoskin Archive is housed at the University of Reading and contains a wealth of material relating to Dwoskin’s life, work and the period he lived in. The Legacies of Stephen Dwoskin is a three year AHRC-research project looking at Dwoskin’s social, political, technological and cultural influences, considering his work in relation to new scholarship in gender, disability studies and phenomenology, and digital forensics and data exploration.
Dear Robert, 13 March 1991
Stephen Dwoskin
20'
1991
UK
As a prelude to the new commissions a rare screening of one of a series of video letters Stephen Dwoskin’s video letters exchanged with the filmmaker Robert Kramer in 1991 which captures his voice and thoughts in everyday life. Of the videos Dwoskin said ‘It was more like writing, in that you didn’t have to involve anyone else in it. Not including editing was again like doing a written letter – you don’t really edit your letters when you write to friends – so the idea was simply to just do whatever we could in the camera.’
Hevn
P. Staff
5'
2022
USA/UK
P. Staff's new single-screen work Hevn cuts together digital and analogue filmmaking techniques with poetry, hand painted animation and industrial sound.
The work combines influence from Stephen Dwoskin’s exploration of pleasure and pain in the sick or debilitated body with Staff's own video and poetry practice exploring the volatility of queer and trans bodies through dreaming, volatility, inebriation and exhaustion.
Undercurrent 528
Evan Ifekoya
16'
2022
UK
An empowered breath
A meditative breath
A breath of pleasure and release
A series of invitations were sent out by Ifekoya to their extended community for a dancer, a drummer, a gathering around breath and breathing and a sonic response to these images. Participants were invited to take part in person, or virtually, to explore tantric techniques of visualisation, breath work, movement and sound to awaken the senses, release the Bliss hormone and heal the Divided Self.
This new video work explores the relationship between documentation and liveness, opening portals of intimacy by bringing people together through different spaces and time. Inspired by Sylvia Wynter’s statement that drums are ““enabling mechanism(s) of consciousness reversal” (Black Metamorphosis), Undercurrent 528 is an offering of rhythmic medicine.
Boy (winter)
Margaret Salmon
20'
2022
UK
Boy (winter) is a film study, shot on 35mm film, presenting viewers with a set of encounters,
celluloid descriptions and imaginative analysis of contemporary boyhood. Shot on location in Glasgow in late 2021, this is the first in a two-part series of films exploring masculinity and stages of (identifying) male physical and psychological development in Britain.
This work is in response to the expansive oeuvre of Stephen Dwoskin, in particular his early portrait films, but also follows a strand of research and enquiry which has been active in Salmon’s own feminist film practice. That is, gendered dynamics experienced within the everyday, expressed through the body and film culture.