Upcoming Events: Film Screening And Workshop

Wednesday 11 August, 6pm
Wednesdays at the Adam: Film screening
Derek Jarman, Blue, 199

Join us on Wednesday 11 August at 6pm for the last of our series of film screenings associated with our current exhibition, Crossings. Like the works in the exhibition, these films have been selected for their relevance as we grapple with the effects of global lockdowns and the heightened anxieties generated by events of 2020, films that register the polarities of inside and outside, illness and health, public and private.

As filmmaker Derek Jarman’s health deteriorated due to AIDS-related illness in the early 1990s, he began to lose his vision. Rendered partially blind, his vision interrupted by blue light, Jarman’s last film, Blue, gives over to the monochrome colour. His film consists of a static, Yves Klein Blue, with a soundtrack of narrated voiceovers. Featuring the voices of Jarman and friends Tilda Swinton, Nigel Terry and John Quentin, the poetic voiceovers tell the story of Blue, as a character and colour, and of Jarman’s day-to-day life as a gay man living in 1990s London.

Boaz Levin, responding to Jarman’s film in his essay ‘On Distance’, considers the colour blue a place of refuge, to him it is “as if Jarman’s monochrome screen becomes a retreat from the danger of overexposure, a cure for the redundancy of figurative representation, a space for affect, perhaps, rather than mere sensation.”

Blue will be screened in the gallery at 6pm, and runs for 79 minutes.

Saturday 21 August
Public/private
Workshop
Victoria University of Wellington, Kelburn Campus
OK319 Seminar Room, Old Kirk Building, Gate 3, Kelburn Parade

Join us on Saturday 21 August, the final weekend of Crossings, for a half-day workshop exploring the public/private divide and art’s role in mediating these states. Led by Christina Barton, co-curator of Crossings, Susan Ballard, who researches and teaches at the intersections of art and the environment, and Heather Galbraith, who has been responsible for two iterations of Christchurch’s Scape Public Art project, the workshop will use Crossings as a talking point with some of the artists present. It will take participants from the inner workings of the artist’s mind, to the conditions of public exhibition and the politics of the public sphere as they are taking shape today against the dynamics of control and dissent, access and exclusion, solidarity and alienation.

Limited to 20 participants. To secure a place email ann.gale@vuw.ac.nz. Further details of the workshop, and readings, will be distributed prior to the event.

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