cinema of noise

An Ciúnas / The Silence, a solo exhibition by artist Marianne Keating. As an immersive, three-channel film installation, the exhibition brings together complex intersecting narratives addressing overlooked aspects of Irish migration during Ireland's colonial rule by Britain, and their enduring legacies in the present.

The presentation of An Ciúnas / The Silence will continue in Ireland with a tour throughout 2024-26, initiated and organised by SIRIUS, Cobh, County Cork; beginning at The Model, Sligo and including Galway Arts Centre, Galway; Rua Red, Dublin; Limerick City Gallery of Art; and Wexford Arts Centre.

Further information at The Showroom, London here

Frieze review article 2023

57 mins • 5.1 mix

Artist: Marianne Keating

Sound Design: Rob Szeliga

Edward / Maurice draws upon works by two of Cambridge’s most acclaimed alumni: Christopher Marlowe’s play Edward II and E.M Forster’s novel Maurice. Both texts feature fully realised complex gay protagonists within historic settings. A 13th century king is murdered with a red-hot poker and a 1900s love triangle between Cambridge students and a gamekeeper flourishes in light of the green wood.

Giles’ 30 min film is set on the final day of a summer drama camp; we join a young LGBTQI+ group as they embody these texts to explore how history, power and class have shaped same sex relationships across the centuries.

Further information at Cambridge Visual Culture

30 mins • Stereo mix

Artist: Ian Giles

Sound Designer: Rob Szeliga

Nested Cinema is a new immersive experience that complicates the boundaries between the physical and the virtual, between the real and the imaginary.

Nested Cinema reimagines film through orchestrating smart technology and devices across three distinct layers of experience – traditional screens, the installation space, and virtual reality – extending cinematic atmospheres across the three nested layers, giving rise to a new immersive mode of dramatic fiction.

More information here

16 min • Multi-channel video with 7.1 Sound Projection

Artist: Pavel Prokopic

Sound Design and Music: Rob Szeliga

Filmed on location in Ireland and Jamaica, Landlessness (2017-2020), analyses the largely undocumented and unaddressed migration of the Irish diaspora to Jamaica, responding to the cultural legacies of colonialism and the human consequences of imperialism.

More information here

26 min • 2-channel Video with 2.1 Sound Projection

Artist: Marianne Keating

Sound Design: Rob Szeliga

More information here.

5 mins • Stereo mix

Artist: Will Pham

Electronic Score / Sound Design: Rob Szeliga

Inspired by the Submit to Love Studios collective’s lived experience of brain injury, Common Threads explores ideas of heritage, talent and otherness – and the many ways underrepresented stories can be told. In keeping with the Studio’s collective ethos, a number of these works have been created collaboratively. For many of the artists this is the first use of textile and embroidery in their practice.

This video was commissioned as part of the exhibition.

https://autograph.org.uk • https://www.submittolovestudios.org/

More information about the upcoming June-August 2021 exhibition here.

12 mins • Stereo mix

Director: Posy Dixon

Sound Designer: Rob Szeliga

FROM WATER is an immersive video installation that invites the public to contemplate water from inside Stephen Turner's Exbury Egg as part of his project 'Natura Prima’ Thamesmead - Venice 2019-21.

Before the egg there is water. We all come from water and the video installation makes a link between Thamesmead, Tello/Girsu (Iraq), Treviso (Italy), and Santos (Brazil) - where Dani Tagen was born. These four places have a very close connection with the artist: they are all places she has lived - even if temporally. They all have an intrinsic connection with water and also represent milestones in her life.

FROM WATER emphasises the connections we, as human beings, have with one another and water. The video installation moving images and soundscapes portray water movements, tides and wave ripples from Thamesmead waters. FROM WATER is a place of wonder. Where one goes inside to lose track of time and reconnect with nature.

8 minutes • 3-channel sound (45 degrees left, centre, 45 degress right) *

Artist: Dani Tagen

Sound Design: Rob Szeliga

*Sound Focusing - The sound is focused across the concave structure to the listening/viewing spot on the other side.

The Moon Is Right Over My Head examines Irish/Jamaican connections and the search for a new liberation when history is not history, but what happens now.

Marianne Keating’s research examines the resulting legacy of the undocumented migration of the Irish diaspora to Jamaica during the nineteenth century, addressing their impact on contemporary Jamaica whilst responding to the cultural legacies of colonialism and the human consequences of imperialism. The exhibition examines both Ireland and Jamaica’s fight for self-determination and independence from the British Empire, which mirrored similar anti-colonial and liberation movements across the globe.

At the centre of the exhibition are three films. Better Must Come – A New Jamaica (2019) interrogates the impact of the enduring two-party political system and the resulting gang violence on contemporary Jamaica. A Beautiful Dream (2020) explores Ireland during 1920 and the escalation of the Irish War of Independence. A Riotous Assembly (2020) examines the 1938 workers strikes in Jamaica, a pivotal moment in the nation’s history.

More information about the exhibition at Black Rower Projects

3 x 4-channel sound installation films
3 x online stereo films

Director: Marianne Keating

Sound Design and Music: Rob Szeliga

Based on a true story, The Hermit is a film poem which follows a man without a home and who has no desire for one. Afraid of permanency, he lives in a nightmare of endless transition, going aimlessly from job to job. The Hermit questions contemporary notions of belonging in a temporary and unsettled world, taking us on a journey through the fears of this strangely detached existence.

5 mins • 5.1 / Stereo mix

Director: Kristina Cranfeld

Music and Sound Designer: Rob Szeliga

More information to follow soon.


7.30 mins • 4.1 / Stereo mix

Artisi: Mariken Wessels

Sound Designer: Rob Szeliga

Composer: Terrence Dunn

The extensive group show United by AIDS—An Exhibition about Loss, Remembrance, Activism and Art in Response to HIV/AIDS sheds light on the multifaceted and complex interrelation between art and HIV/AIDS from the 1980s to the present. It examines the blurring of the boundary between art production and HIV/AIDS activism and spotlights artists who have been leading voices in this creative discourse, which remains vital today. The presentation gathers positions that illustrate the diversity of the (artistic) response to the HI virus and AIDS, with an explicit focus on works that address themes such as isolation, transformation, and the inexorable passing of time and mortality in relation to the politics of the body and representation. Since the introduction of highly active antiretroviral therapy in the second half of the 1990s, AIDS has widely come to be seen as a phenomenon of the past, with little significance for the life of our societies today. On the global scale, however, deaths due to complications from AIDS still number almost one million per year. Divided into four chapters, the exhibition seeks to untangle the complex and diverse narratives around HIV/AIDS and discuss their fragility in a contemporary perspective.

Running: August 31 to November 10, 2019 at Migros Museum, Zurich

For further exhibition information go here

10 mins • Stereo mix

Director: Edward Thomasson

Sound Design: Rob Szeliga

Text and Images: https://migrosmuseum.ch/en

When you are thinking the unthinkable and you just need time to make up your mind.

5 mins • Stereo mix

Director: Dani Tagen

Music: Rob Szeliga

Artist, Ian Giles’ newly commissioned film Trojan Horse / Rainbow Flag – about the closure of LGBTQI+ pub the Joiner’s Arms – provides the conceptual springboard for the screenings. Queering the restrictions of a fixed programme, each city will see a different selection of artists’ film and video presented alongside Giles’ new work; the artists included are: Prem Sahib, Charlotte Prodger, Patrick Staff, Sam Ashby, Rob Crosse, Hannah Quinlan & Rosie Hastings and Mathew Parkin. Supported by Arts Council England.

More information about the upcoming screenings over at video.org.uk

25 mins • Stereo mix

Director: Ian Giles

Sound Designer: Rob Szeliga

Image: Sophie Cundale, Hens, 2018, film still, 4K video, 12 minutes duration.

More information to follow soon.

12 mins • 5.1 / Stereo mix

Director: Sophie Cundale

Sound Designer: Rob Szeliga

Lucy Beech’s new film focuses on the movement of bodies and bio-genetic substances across borders in what has come to be known as 'reproductive exile'.

The film maps the apparatus of transnational assisted reproduction, following the story of a woman whose bodily processes are facilitated by a chain of human and non-human female bodies, invisibly linked by the production of sex hormones central to reproductive technologies.

Shot in Czech Republic in a newly renovated facility where the lack of legislation offers a degree of freedom to a diverse range of commissioning parents, the protagonist is introduced to 'Eve' (short for Evatar) branded as the 'mother of all micro humans'. Developed and utilized by entrepreneurial clinics to revolutionize drug testing and enable individualized patient treatment, Eve is the future of drug testing in women and personalized medicine. As the intended parent discovers more about her body’s incapacity to produce the hormones she needs to stimulate her ovaries she becomes obsessed with Eve, confiding in her about the drugs she injects daily; derived in some cases from pregnant horse urine and in others from concentrated urine of menopausal women.

When the ovaries are stimulated to produce eggs, the response can at times be excessive and in a drug-induced hallucination exacerbated by the side effects of ovarian hyper stimulation, the protagonist visualizes the intricate constellation of invisible bodies, human and animal, that work, care, constitute and provide for her reproductive journey.

The film is co-commissioned by Lafayette Anticipations – Fondation d’entreprise Galeries Lafayette, Paris, De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill-on-Sea, and Tramway, Glasgow.

Currently showing at De La Warr Pavilion [Sep-Oct 2018]

More information at: Lafayette Anticipation, Paris

Stills: Lucy Beech, View of film produced for Le centre ne peut tenir, 2018

30 mins • LCR / 2-channel mix / 5.1 mix

Director: Lucy Beech

Sound Designer: Rob Szeliga

Assistant Sound Effects: John Cohen

Rob Crosse works in moving image and photography through which he explores ageing, bodies, desire and manufacturing. For his solo presentation, the artist has produced a new series of photographs and a moving image work, which continue his investigation into older male communities and social rituals. Footage taken during the preparation for a vintage car race is positioned with photographic portraits of the artist’s lovers. Together they meditate on time, age, and the careful maintenance of a car or human body. [Text: Jerwood Press Release].

Exhibition information: Jun 20th-Aug 26th Jerwood Space, London

More information at: Jerwood Visual Arts

10 mins • Stereo mix

Director: Rob Crosse

Sound Designer: Rob Szeliga

“An Viet (Well Settled)” is a film that revisits these many historical layers from the artist’s personal viewpoint as a second-generation Vietnamese Londoner.

Will Pham introduces the film with a BBC news report from the late 90s, featuring Mr Vu recounting his escape from Vietnam. He then revisits the centre in 2018, where he facilitates conversations about the history of the An Viet Foundation such as a reading by Toan, Mr. Vu’s son, from his father’s autobiography.

Pham is interested in the change of values in society in order to understand where we are heading in the future. The film is like a love song, celebrating the legacy of the An Viet Foundation’s achievements against a precarious socio-political backdrop where community spaces are being systematically dismantled, areas becoming gentrified and those in power not being held accountable.

Installation image: Andy Keate

More information here.

20 mins • Stereo mix

Director: Will Pham

Sound Designer: Rob Szeliga

Affective Signs is an ongoing film project that has commenced in 2015, forming a part of Pavel Prokopic's doctoral research at the University of Salford, entitled 'Between Formal Structure, the Real and the Moving Body: Searching for Affective Significance in Film Performance'. 

At the heart of the project is the concept of Affective Sign, which represents subtle-yet-emphatic, ‘magic’ moments in film, where aspects of style coincide with a unique instant of performance and a contingent manifestation of reality.

On a theoretical level, the concept is grounded in the duality between affect and sign, and the fact that film is a permanent, still structure, but also has the ability to capture traces of the movement of the real, which register on film as affects: non-representational ‘flashes’ of impersonal sensibilities located in the film itself. The paradoxical duality in film between movement and stillness (affect and sign, or, the contingent and the structural) gives rise to what I call ‘affective significance’ – an audio-visual meaning that is located outside of language, knowledge and (inter-subjective) communication, a meaning that is felt before it can be thought.

The practice seeks to expand the potential of cinema by creating suitable conditions for affective significance to emerge through innovative work with film performance and cinematography, and multiple post-production methods. This results in a series of five-minute films – Affective Signs – as well as the development of unique directorial methods and visual approaches to non-narrative film, and theoretical contributions to the debates surrounding film performance and philosophy.

5-8 mins x 10 videos • Stereo mix

Director: Pavel Prokopic

Sound Designer: Rob Szeliga

In January 2018 Chelsea Space presents After BUTT: a new film by Ian Giles exploring the cultural and social legacy of BUTT magazine (2001-2011); a publication made by and for gay men, noted for its iconic pink pages and candid interviews.

Within the filmmaking process, Ian Giles continues his employment of first-hand research, participatory workshops and verbatim theatre as structures to produce a social network. The magazine, BUTT acts as a locative device to consider gay histories, the presentation of gay men within mainstream media and links between medical advances and sexual freedom. Working with a group of young gay men in a series of workshops, the script is a result of a collective vocal exercise to re-narrate the recollections of the men who originally founded the magazine from transcribed interviews with the artist.

Presented in the gallery is the film made from the final workshop where the young group re-voice the original interviews as an act of storytelling between generations; we hear the group sharing sexually charged narratives and frank reflections. The work also interrogates BUTT’s imbalances, raising questions around the magazines handling of race and gender. There is a playful relationship with language in the film: words becoming transferable between originators and speakers, to construct an oral portrait of the magazine.

After BUTT is commissioned by Chelsea Space and funded by Arts Council England

More information at Chelsea Space

30 mins • 2-channel mix

Director: Ian Giles

Sound Editor: Rob Szeliga

Cibic's NADA trilogy examines three of European modernism’s star architects and the role their work played in national representation. The starting point for Act I is Vjenceslav Richter and the Yugoslav pavilion he designed for the Brussels World Exhibition in 1958. Act II takes place in Arne Jacobsen’s Aarhus City Hall (1937-1942), whilst the third act is placed within Haus Lange and Haus Esters designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe in Krefeld, Germany for the silk barons that were instrumental in affirming silk as the new national export within the pre-WW2 European soft power game. In the third chapter of NADA Cibic addresses van der Rohe’s Krefeld architecture of the 1920s through the lens of the political discussions concerning the aesthetic choices for the representation of Germany at world fairs of mid 20th Century.

NADA Act III: The Exhibition was commissioned specifically for the artist’s exhibition at House Esters by Kunstmuseen Krefeld that included an immersive installation developed within the vila. The script for the film is assembled from archival transcripts, political discussions, reports and personal letters surrounding Germany’s presentations at world expositions in 1929, 1937 and 1958 and their legacy. Cibic devises the script into three positions: the Artist, the Curator and Germania engage in a discussion about the aesthetics and style of the artworks and architecture that should be exhibited at an undisclosed event of national interest in order to ensure international success. Whilst engaging in the discussion, the women work on the artefacts and their display within a set specifically built in House Lange encompassing mainly two styles: that of figurative representation and that of an abstract positioning. They are sculpting, polishing, curating and destroying physical manifestations of their words, shifting their position of picturesque allegories into an active political stance. Their scripted sentences combine diverse ideological positions through time and space pointing to the universal code of merging life and art in a service to the state in order to affect society. What can we learn from the history’s more sinister accounts of this most awkward relationship is one among many questions Cibic’s work raises through its tireless and variegated archaeologies.

17.00 mins • Stereo mix

Director: Jasmina Cibic

Sound Designer • Music Editor: Rob Szeliga

Composer: Filip Sijanec

Co-commissioned by European Capital of Culture Aarhus 2017, BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art Gateshead and supported by Arts Council England, Northern Film School at Leeds Beckett University and Waddington Studios London.

The film is based on the 1958 production of Béla Bartók’s pantomime ballet The Miraculous Mandarin – the work that the Yugoslav State chose to represent its new direction on Nations Day at the Brussels EXPO almost sixty years ago. Here it is repurposed, mis-imagined and overwritten with new purpose in collaboration with the choreographer Lea Anderson. Bartok’s original characters – the pimps, prostitute and exotic Mandarin – are here replaced with the archetypes of politicians, the ideal of Mother Nation, and that most easily abused of Modern practitioners: the architect. Shot in the Arne Jacobsen’s Aarhus City Hall it links across time and space various European models of statecraft, soft power and its framing.
 

13.00 mins • Stereo mix

Director: Jasmina Cibic

Sound Designer • Music Editor: Rob Szeliga

Composer: Filip Sijanec

Prime Time follows a group of older gay men as they journey on a cruise ship around the Caribbean. Members of a social network of so-called ‘Prime Timers’, they regularly get together on excursions of this type, to renew acquaintances, re-affirm the bonds of belonging to a supportive community, and rekindle a little itch of adventure.

The film will premiere at Grundy Art Gallery, in the first major solo exhibition in a public gallery by artist Rob Crosse. Alongside the presentation of his work, Crosse has selected works from the Grundy’s collection to display in an adjoining room. This is intended to act as a prelude to his work and to draw out threads from the films that relate to themes and concerns found within the gallery’s collection, and vice-versa.

The exhibition also coincides with the fiftieth anniversary of the de-criminalisation of homosexuality in England and Wales and celebrates the LGBTQ community who live in, work and visit the resort of Blackpool. More information to follow shortly.
 

23.00 mins • 2-channel mix

Director: Rob Crosse

Sound Designer: Rob Szeliga

Film and Video Umbrella (FVU)

What is the future of citizenship in Britain and what new rules willbe proposed for immigrants to become citizens? Manufactured Britishness is a project derived from the compulsory and very real Life in the UK test, which examines skills for integrating into British society. The project critically explores the assessment program contrived by Britain in testing for citizenship by proposing a future manifestation of the Life in the UK test. In this future, we see immigrants as an exploitable material, a living currency, compelled to sustain national identity in order to maximise capitalistic agendas.

Text extract originally written in 2013, the first incarnation of the film. More information at the project homepage.

13 mins • stereo

Director: Kristina Cranfeld

Sound Editor/Designer: Rob Szeliga

The central element of Jasmina Cibic's project Nada is Richter’s first, but unrealized design for the Yugoslav Pavilion at the 1958 EXPO in Brussels. Cibic appropriates and recreates the pavilion as a sculpture, which in turn functions as the skeleton of her new short film, around which the project is centered.

In the single channel video installation, violinist Dejana Sekulić continually tunes the architecture according to the Miraculous Mandarin, a musical composition for ballet by Béla Bartók which was chosen to represent Yugoslavia at the most important dates of the pavilion – its National Days – whose role was to maximise the attention and the number of visitors. The fact that the Yugoslav state chose the Bartók ballet as its representative moment is in itself intriguing since the ballet had been repeatedly banned by numerous political systems due to its explicit subject matter – the conflict between a prostitute and her pimp and clients.

More about the project: jasminacibic.org/projects/nada-act-1/

10.00 mins • Stereo mix

Director: Jasmina Cibic

Sound Designer • Foley Artist: Rob Szeliga

Composer: Filip Sijanec

Joanne Salley, winner of the 1998 Miss Northern Ireland beauty pageant, artist, teacher and champion boxer had a formative influence on Fujiwara, nurturing his creative talents as a scholarship student at the prestigious Harrow School for boys.

Some years after his departure, Joanne found herself at the centre of a damaging tabloid scandal after students discovered and circulated topless photographs of her that had been taken privately.

The media campaign that followed played on stereotypes of women to support the sensational headlines, tarnishing her reputation as a teacher and public persona. Five years on, Fujiwara and Joanne embarked on the production of a short film that explores issues Salley faced in the wake of the scandal and aims to present a more complex picture of her.

9 mins • Stereo

Artist: Simon Fujiwara

Sound Editor: Rob Szeliga

Exhibition running 7 Oct - 29 Jan 2017 at the Photographers' Gallery

Full description of project and additional media at Film and Video Umbrella and the Photographers' Gallery website.

The exhibition includes recent works on paper alongside Pressure, 2016, a new video that explores how feelings are managed and organised in mutually beneficial relationships. Constructed and recorded on the set of his play, Volunteers, 2016, at David Roberts Art Foundation earlier this year, the video employs text and song to describe three fictional situations in which people voluntarily allow themselves to be used by other people. The video is part of a recent body of work that incorporates painting, theatre-making and video production to describe how exchanges are staged between individuals.

14.35 mins • Stereo mix

Director: Edward Thomasson

Sound Editor: Rob Szeliga

Text and Images: GalleriesNow.net

The subjects of Crosse's films, often groups of older men, are bound into an intimate and supportive network through a collective activity. A time that celebrates former technological acheivements before digital communications, virtual relationships and cloud-based knowledge hubs. Social rituals are central to Crosse's films. These secular rituals appear both strange nd unquestionably necessary, or significant. It is Crosse's respectful engagement with the men in his films that drive the works. Their stories and conversations allow him access into the group to observe the smallest gestures, the subtlest movements and interactions.

8 mins • 2-channel Installation

Director: Rob Crosse

Sound Designer: Rob Szeliga

Kingsgate Project Space exhibition

Exhibition Preview: Friday 1 April 2016, 6-9pm

Exhibition: 2 April - 7 May 2016

'A Perfect Instrument (Kristina)' follows the well-known Lithuanian actress Kristina Savickytė over a day of teaching and learning in performance-led workshops and rehearsals. Filmed in various locations in Vilnius, the historic city sandwiched between East and West, the video explores the extent to which both an individual and a place must bend and perform for shifting contexts. This work is the fourth of a series of ongoing video portraits by the artist, in which individuals are selected for their proximity to global dilemmas, and for their capacity to articulate human anxieties.

'A Perfect Instrument (Kristina)' was made with support from Arts Council England whilst on residency at RUPERT Centre for Art and Education.

30 mins • 5.1 mix

Director: Jamie Johnson

Sound Editor: Rob Szeliga

Re-recording Mixer: Rob Szeliga

Duke’s Rise is an atmospheric journey through a newly formed British landscape. In alliance with the most traditional values, this ideological journey begins with a freshly painted model village. Here, everything looks glorious, established and sanitized. Tightly packed rooftops and narrow streets meet in repressive uniformity, yearning for the past.

Performed across an idyllic pastoral British landscape, an overly theatrical ritual is happening. Wading through artificial fog, a priest is blessing British borders. He chants Psalm 8 “O Lord our governor, how glorious is your name in all the world!” swinging his incense back and forth over endless wheat fields. “We are a Christian society” as he reminds us all.

Duke’s Rise is an absurdist take on the debates around weakening cultural and religious heritage, so often reported as a crisis for the Great British identity, in promoting attempts to reclaim it. The project critically reflects upon rising nationalism in Britain and envisages the future in a repressive, aggressive and yet supposedly cleansed society.

Film available online here.

8 mins • stereo

Director: Kristina Cranfeld

Sound Editor/Designer: Rob Szeliga

Tokyo, 2012

15 mins • Stereo mix

Video: Paul Roquet

Sound: Rob Szeliga