Say-So, a programme of new and existing artists’ moving image works I curated for Glasgow Film Festival 2016.
Say-so was commissioned by MAP guest editors, Claire Walsh and Suzanne van der Lingen.
Works by: URSULA MAYER | SASKIA OLDE WOLBERS | STEVE CONNOLLY | JEM COHEN | MONA HATOUM | with Intermissions by LYNDSAY MANN.
Introduction to the screening:
”Say-so relates to my research on voice, authority and uncertainty, investigating subjective knowledges within the institution, and the relationship between an individual’s experience of being heard and their future opportunities to be heard.
The programme takes the form of a cumulative conversation across works, which shifts between self reflections and observations of ideologically charged, collective narratives. Within the programme are a series of Intermissions I produced with voices from the School of Scottish Studies Sound Archive at the University of Edinburgh.
The title, Say-so, stems from an arguably common childhood experience to be told, ‘...because I / he / she / they say-so’. This early dynamic seemed a simple route to think about ideas of knowledge and authority more broadly and consider ways in which active hierarchies from our past pasts inform present experiences and expectations.
Which forms of knowledge imbue a voice with enough value or authority to be heard?”
Rouge Carmin, from Intermissions, digital video still, Lyndsay Mann, 2016.
above: The Entertainer, from Intermissions, digital video still, Lyndsay Mann, 2016.
Say-So programme:
Lyndsay Mann, Intermission1: Cilla Fisher’s view of herself as an entertainer’, 1986/2016 (3:17 min)
Ursula Mayer, The Crystal Gaze, 2007 (8 min)
Saskia Olde Wolbers, Placebo, 2002 (6 min)
Lyndsay Mann, Intermission 2: Girl of thirteen rows her father’s fishing boat, 1976/2016 (2:21 min)
Steve Connolly, Mas se Perdio (We Lost More), 2008 (14 min)
Lyndsay Mann, Intermission 3: A narrow escape from burkers (body snatchers) and their dogs, 1969/2016 (3:01 min)
Jem Cohen, Little Flags, 2000 (5:48 min)
Jem Cohen, NYC Weights and Measures, 2006 (7:15 min)
Lyndsay Mann, Intermission 4: Australian reminiscences of a Scottish immigrant aunt’s cooking, 1972/2016 (2:46 min)
Mona Hatoum, Measures Of Distance, 1988 (15 min)
Many thanks to Suzanne van der Lingen and Claire Walsh, who commissioned this screening as part of their year-long editorial residency at MAP, and to Cathlin Macaulay, curator at the School of Scottish Studies Archives. Thanks also to Iain Canning, Glasgow Film Festival and CCA.
Supported by: Creative Scotland, Glasgow Film Festival, Centre for Contemporary Arts, Glasgow, Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop. Thanks to: Maureen Paley, LUX, VDB, Sound Archive at the School of Scottish Studies, University of Edinburgh.
Introduction continued:
“Intermissions:
Materials from the University’s ethnographic sound archive are paired with hand-painted gouache samples from the 1920s. These colour swatches are now cracked, unevenly coloured and show signs of age (or performance), to bathe the audience with textured colour.
I saw this as an opportunity to site individual voices among collections of voices, and to stimulate an exchange between the local and global across the works. These interruptions create a rhythm across the programme and position central Havana, the streets of New York, a correspondence between a daughter in London and her mother in Lebanon, an art deco palace and the intensive care unit of a hospital, in relation to the local. The archive is a collection of largely Scottish voices, yet I also use the word local to articulate the details of everyday experience, the quiet and habitual, that inform and influence our expectations and behaviours.
Each intermission relates to the work before and after its placement in the screening order. Describing the programme as a cumulative conversation is indicative of my wider approach to making work, illustrating ways that in my practice previous works seeps into new projects.
For example, Intermission 4 plays between Jem Cohen’s NYC Weights and Measures (2006) and Measures of Distance (1988) by Mona Hatoum. Cohen’s work addresses the changing attitudes and securities in America in relation to the Middle East, and Hatoum’s work voices letters between herself and her mother describing exile from Lebanon due to civil war. In 2010, I was reading much of Pablo Neruda’s writing of his time in Spain in the 1930s, which led me to a period of research around the Spanish Civil War. Per head of population, more men and women left from Scotland to join the International Brigades in Spain than from any other country. Literature explains this through shared affinities of solidarity and workers' unity that spurred many to walk to London from Scotland to gain passage to Spain. This was also a generation of young men and women who missed the ‘adventure’ of WW1 with little means to venture beyond their local environment.
I met with author Daniel Gray whose book, ‘Homage to Caledonia’ (2009) focuses on Scotland’s part in the Spanish Civil War. Daniel had interviewed men and women in Scotland who had made the journey to fight, and had also been given access to home archives of kept letters written to families by loved ones from their time in Spain. Many of these letters were concerned with olive oil. Men and women from Scotland were perturbed by the unusual taste and texture of a heavy oil that seemed to coat everything they ate. It was unsettling and worthy of pages of writing. These details quietly illuminate the experience of otherness and articulate the local yet speak for collective experience.
Intermission 4, ‘Australian reminiscences of a Scottish immigrant aunt’s cooking’ (1972/2016), presented a way to create space between these works from Cohen and Hatoum while keeping them in dialogue with each other through memories of home and exile, food and comfort.”