Join us for an evening of screenings and conversation at Midlands Arts Centre.
Exploring common themes and techniques across artist Alice Theobald’s practice this event will include screenings of three previous moving images works - IL Y AURA (There will be), 2022, We May Believe or We May Never Know, 2018 and What Not to Wear Out My Soul, 2019 - followed by a Q & A with the artist and writer Phoebe Blatton. Presented in partnership with Midlands Arts Centre.
Like Perfection is a Lie (An Ode to Your Potential), which is currently being exhibited at Eastside Projects, these three works explore performance and authenticity; how we experience the world and the way we behave, perform and react to each other within it; the use of improvisation, the potential of music and soundtrack; the friction between individual and collective aspirations and experience; and themes of community, neoliberalism, work, freedom, success, failure and hope.
As well as these themes and ideas Alice and Phoebe will also discuss the process of working with professional and non-professional actors, and collaborating in response to residencies, communities and location.
SCREENING PROGRAMME:
IL Y AURA (There will be), 2022 - 19 minutes An experimental screenplay initially inspired by absurdist playwright, Eugène Ionesco’s one-act play ‘La Leçon’, 1951. Set in a Parisian apartment, the film depicts a student arriving in an older professors’ home for an ambiguous, ritualised and increasingly menacing language tutorial. The film stars the artist herself alongside French actor Thibault de Montalembert perhaps best known as ‘Mathias Barneville’ in the TV series 'Call my Agent', 2015-2020.
We May Believe or We May Never Know, 2018 - 30 minutes A meta-documentary where a group of seniors discuss their trials and tribulations as a fictional group of fourteen year olds living in the present day. Conversation straddles fact, lived experience and desires with personal observations and imagined characters touching on subjects such as gender, class, immigration, love, drugs, jobs and ambition.
What Not to Wear Out My Soul, 2019 - 37 minutes An atmospheric site-specific performance which took place after shopping hours on a stage installed on top of a Costa Coffee in the middle of Walthamstow Shopping Mall. It included pre-recorded and live feed projection, a live musical score with contrabassoon, violin, piano and singing combined with material recorded during a training session between the protagonist (Alice Theobald) and a Method Acting coach talking through the experience of shopping for a pair of shoes to wear to a job interview they hope to have.
OUR SPEAKERS
Phoebe Blatton writes about art and culture for various international publications, including ArtReview, Art Monthly, Frieze, Flash Art, Apollo, Ocula and MAP. She co-founded The Coelacanth Press, which produced the serial arts publication The Coelacanth Journal. The journal featured over sixty contributors, including Turner Prize nominees Tai Shani, Anthea Hamilton and Monster Chetwynd.
Alice Theobald is an artist working across a range of media including video, film, live performance, installation, text, drawing and sculpture to explore the divisions between stage and life and the discrepancies between expression, appearance and feeling. Borrowing from the vocabulary of cinema, television, theatre, literature and soundtracks, her practice is concerned with the desire for authenticity and commodification of emotion, and what this might say about empathy, aspiration and how we (mis)communicate and present ourselves. Alice has exhibited internationally, including significant solo presentations at Eastside Projects (current), South London Gallery, Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Chisenhale Gallery, Gaudel Del Stampa and Art Night also co-founded the music group/ artist-collective Ravioli Me Away.