Artists’ Film Biennial, ICA 2014

Abstract

Over the last two decades a resurgence of interest in the cinematic has marked certain areas of the contemporary art world in what has come to be known as its 'cinematic turn'. １ Art institutions continue to reflect a growing interest in the moving image in its many forms, whether through the presence of moving image installations or through the programming of artists' film within both the 'black box' setting of the cinema and the contemporary gallery. ２ The proliferation of moving images has become an almost ubiquitous feature of the modern exhibition-going experience, giving rise to a number of discourses concerning the nature and role of film curation and cinematic spectatorship, including an ontological concern with the medium of film. Framed against a series of debates that focused on the role of the curator within this climate, the inaugural Artists' Film Biennial was held over four days in early July 2014 at the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) in London. ３ Though the ICA has a long tradition of programming festivals of experimental and independent film this was the first showcase of the biennial in its current incarnation. ４ The event drew clearly on its exhibition lineage, particularly in extending the structural framework of the last biennial held there, 2012's LUX/ICA Biennial of Moving Images. Both spanned four days and combined theatricallypresented single screen works alongside numerous opportunities for discussion. Crucially, both events also upheld a curator-centred model, revealing the continuing dominance of the curator's role within the landscape of contemporary art. ５ This review will focus on the structural framework of the biennial before going on to examine the curatorial direction behind several of its programmes.The Artists' Film Biennial positions itself as a celebration of 'artists' film and moving image, a wide-ranging (and yet still the favoured) term for surveys such as this one. As Erika Balsom has noted, the term artist's cinema is impossible to reduce to a single proposition and rather encompasses 'single-channel works alongside multiscreen projection, film as well as video, looped exhibition and scheduled screening times, an interest in the virtuality of a represented world or in the phenomenology of spectatorship, an espousal or a rejection of narrative, and works made expressly for a gallery context and those made for traditional cinematic exhibition but now transported into the white cube'. ６ Works screened at the Artists' Film Biennial reveal a slightly narrower interpretation of the term than the previous description allows, and were mostly limited to single screen film and video works both projected and discussed within the 'black box' of the ICA cinema.