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If this age fails me

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Screening of work by Peter Gidal, Kadeem Oak and Wilf Thust with a discussion based on the research of Jack Booth, Freya Field-Donovan, Lotte L.S. and Johanna Klingler soon to be published in Camera Forward! by MayDay Rooms.

Please book via MayDay Rooms' Eventbrite here

In the 1970s the proliferation of photographic and cinematic practices on the Left put the means of image production and distribution into the hands of ordinary people. London in particular became a live and contested site for work which dealt with the conditions of contemporary civic life. Fifty years on, what should be drawn from the socially enmeshed practices of filmmakers and photographers who worked in London towards the end of the twentieth century?

Please join for a screening and discussion that uses the research and writing from forthcoming MayDay Rooms pamphlet Camera Forward! as the basis for a conversation between documents and people.

This event presents the first opportunity to view the digital transfer of Wilf Thust’s film Is That It? (Part 4), a video compiling work from young people at the Four Corners' Cinema workshop. Thust’s film will be shown alongside more recent work by Peter Gidal and Kadeem Oak.

Screening:

Kadeem Oak, Lift, 2014, 3.54 min, Colour and black and white, sound, ​original format: 16mmm film, SD video transfer
Wilf Thust, Is That It? (Part 4), 1985, 11.18 mins, colour, original format: 16mm film, digital transfer
Wilf Thust, Where is the Gaiety?, 1973, 8.36 mins, black and white, sound, original format animated still photography, digital transfer
Peter Gidal, Assumption, 1997, 1.25 mins, Colour, original format: 16mm film, digital transfer
Following the screening, invited speakers Jack Booth, Freya Field-Donovan, Johanna Klingler and Lotte L.S. discuss their respective research projects into the relationship between the New Left, squatting and the media, the films of Wilf Thust, the photography of Terry Dennett, and the film collective Cinema Action.

Commissioned by MayDay Rooms to contribute to Camera Forward!, the speakers’ research offers four separate viewpoints into the MayDay Rooms archive, a public resource which contains masses of material relating to histories of radical resistance. The event aims to bring out connections and comparison between multiple sites of grassroots, radical and counter cultural archives in London. Including the Women’s Art Library and Jo Spence Memorial Library Archive, who are participating in this event via the Animating Archives project. 

Event organised by Jacob Bard-Rosenberg, Rosemary Grennan, Freya Field Donovan and Alexandra Symons Sutcliffe and is a collaboration between MayDay Rooms and Animating Archives. With the support of Birkbeck Institute for the Moving Image, Urban Intersections Experimental Collective (Birkbeck Institute for Social Research) and the Centre for the Study of Contemporary Art (UCL).

Camera Forward! will be published by MayDay in May/June please keep an eye on MayDay’s website and social media for more information.

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