20 February and 5 March

During our exhibition The Practice of Theories we are hosting two Study Days that will draw out some of the themes of the exhibition. The Study Days are free and open to all but due to limited capacity need to be booked in advance.

20 February

Study Day, 4 - 6pm
Join American poet and blogger Steve Roggenbuck, alongside exhibiting artists Andy Holden and Erica Scourti, for a Study Day exploring writing after the Internet. The afternoon offers a small group of participants the opportunity to focus on this subject and a rare opportunity to explore Steve Roggenbuck’s working methods; Roggenbuck’s most popular video has been viewed over 150,000 times online and he has been profiled by The New York Times, Rolling Stone and The New Yorker. Andy Holden and Erica Scourti will join Roggenbuck for an afternoon of talks and discussion; sharing experiences of writing, authorship, text, time and emotion. 

There are still places for Steve Roggenbuck's live reading event which will be located within Andy Holden’s immersive sculptural work The Dan Cox Library for the Unfinished Concept of Thingly Time. For the event. Roggenbuck, Holden and Erica Scourti will be joined by artist and poet Heather Phillipson for an evening of readings and interventions within the work.

5 March

Study Day, 2 - 5PM
Join Curator Dan Kidner for a Study Day that takes the film Peggy and Fred in Hell, Folding (1984-2015) as a starting point from which to explore the group exhibition The Inoperative Community; an exhibition of experimental narrative film and video that addressed ideas of community and the shifting nature of social relations. The exhibition, at Raven Row gallery, London and curated by Kidner focussed on a period that could be described as the long 1970s (1968-84); all the works were either made during this time, or reflect on the radical social and political movements of the era.

2pm Introduction by curator and writer Dan Kidner
2.15pm – 3.50pm Screening of Leslie Thornton’s Peggy and Fred in Hell: Folding (1984 - 2015), 16mm film and video transferred to digital, 95 minutes.
3.50pm - 4pm Break with tea and coffee available
4 pm - 5pm A presentation by Kidner followed by an open discussion

To book a place, click here

“Peggy and Fred in Hell, Folding (1984-2015) is an open ended episodic work that has been in the making for over thirty years, its protagonists, real-life siblings Janis and Donald Reading, fall down a rabbit hole into a post-apocalyptic world where they are the only humans. With only the loosest backstory, Thornton began filming the children – who were her neighbours – in the early 1980s. She continued to work with them as they grew into teenagers and then young adults, and still maintains contact with them now. Over three decades she has continued to rework the material they shot together, periodically producing new ‘episodes’, and the project has evolved into one of the most singular and complex works of experimental film and video.” The The Inoperative Community, exhibition booklet.

Dan Kidner is a curator and writer. He was previously Director of Picture This, Bristol (2011 - 2013), and co-Director of City Projects, London (2004 - 2011). Over the past 10 years he has produced projects by many artists’ working with film and video including Knut Åsdam, Anja Kirschner and David Panos, Cara Tolmie, Emily Wardill and Jimmy Robert. His books include, with Petra Bauer, Working Together: British Film Collectives in the 1970s (2013) and with George Clark and James Richards, A Detour Around Infermental (2011). 

Leslie Thornton (b. 1951, USA) has been working with video and digital media since the 1980s. Her works have been presented at the Serpentine Gallery, London, Museum of Modern Art, New York, Tate Modern, London, the Whitney Biennial, New York, and documenta 12, Kassel. Her first solo exhibitions, ‘Binocular’ (2011) and ‘Luna’ (2013), were held at Winkleman Gallery, New York.Thornton lives and works in New York and Providence, Rhode Island, where she is Professor of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University, Rhode Island.

Image credit: 
Leslie Thornton
Peggy and Fred in Hell: Folding (1985 – 2015)
Still from digital video (originated on 16mm film), 95 mins
Courtesy of the artist