Shezad Dawood, Leviathan Cycle, 2017-

MIRAJ and Ambika P3 present:

Launch of MIRAJ Ecologies Double Issue 10.1/2 and Landscape and the Moving Image by Catherine Elwes. The event includes talks, screenings and performance.

The Publications:

MIRAJ Issue 10.1/2 – Special Ecologies double issue

Through scholarly articles, features, roundtable discussions, interviews and reviews, Issue 10:1/2 aims to imagine and examine how practices in artists’ film and video can be transformed by a dedicated attention to notions of the Ecological in its many expanded forms.

This double issue of MIRAJ addresses key areas of critical concern, from the culpability of the moving image industry’s extractive and management practices, to the rich potential of the artistic and film-making community to shape, challenge and disrupt dominant disciplinary knowledge and habitual practices and its role in the practical organisation of other futures. It looks beyond western-centred responses to environmental and ecological challenges and asks how might notions of the individual artists’ powers of creation be challenged and what other models of practice are of value in this context?

Landscape and the Moving Image by Catherine Elwes, Intellect, Bristol: 2022 

Elwes takes a journey through the twin histories of landscape art and experimental moving image and discovers how they coalesce in the work of artists from the 1970s to the present day. Drawing on a wide geographical sampling, Elwes considers issues that have preoccupied film and video artists over the years, ranging from ecology, gender, race, performativity, conflict, colonialism and our relationship to the nonhuman creatures with whom we share our world. The book comprises a series of essays that explore how the moving image mediates our relationship to and understanding of landscapes.
Elwes is author of Video Loupe (2000), Video Art a guided tour (2005) and Installation and the Moving Image (2015). She was founding editor of the Moving Image Review & Art Journal (MIRAJ).

The Events 6.30 – 8.30 pm:

  • TJ Demos in virtual conversation with Matthias Kispert about Beyond the World’s Ends: Arts of Living at the Crossing
  • Catherine Elwes in conversation with Colin Perry about Landscape and the Moving Image
  • Becca Voelcker and Tom Cuthbertson in conversation with Lucy Reynolds about ‘Field work: Ogawa Productions as farmer–filmmakers’ and ‘Behaviour: Marking’: Charlotte Prodger’s territoriality.’
  • Rare Screening of Shezad Dawood’s Leviathan Cycle Episode 7: Africana, Ken Bugul & Nemo introduced by the artist in conversation with Michael Mazière. The latest in Shezad Dawood’s expansive film series Leviathan Cycle at the heart of his major long-term multimedia project Leviathan (2017–ongoing), which considers the intersections of both human and non-human ecologies in relation to climate change, migration, and mental health.
  • Rebecca Birch Undermine. Artist and filmmaker Rebecca Birch presents a short performance based on her ongoing work with anti-fracking protestors at Preston New Road. Something violent is occurring beneath their feet. A fracking site is constructed. The subsurface is being fractured. Followed by a Q&A with Maria Walsh.

This event is free and drinks will be served – please get your entry tickets here.

Presented by Moving Image Review and Art Journal (MIRAJ), the Centre for Research and Education in Arts and Media (CREAM), Ecological Futurism, Ambika P3 and the University of Westminster.