CONCRETE CINEMA
Love it or hate it, Coventry’s concrete is part of the experience of living in the city. Concrete Cinema is an outdoor projection installation that will jumpstart a conversation around the materials that make up the city, and the kinds of buildings that we want to live in, work in, and look at. The artists below have been commissioned to make moving image works for concrete: films that recognise and interact with the surface on which they are projected.
Concrete Cinema will pop up around Coventry City centre on the following evenings:
Friday, Jan 28
Saturday, Jan 29
Thursday, Feb 3
Friday, Feb 4
Keep an eye on the Coventry Biennial Twitter and Instagram accounts for details about exactly where and when these guerrilla projections are taking place....
artists
Laura Dicken
Laura Dicken is a socially engaged artist and producer based in the Black Country of the West Midlands. She most frequently works with analogue photography and photo montage techniques and has more recently been developing a series of moving image artworks. Laura’s working processes are consistently built upon meaningful connection and conversation. Her portraits are an authentic collaboration made with the hope of co-creating agency and visibility to those she works with.
Benedict Drew
Benedict Drew works across video, sculpture, drawing and painting, and music. He creates large-scale installations, often concerned with ecstatic responses to socio-political anxiety. Solo exhibitions include The Trickle-Down Syndrome, Whitechapel Gallery, London; KAPUT, QUAD, Derby; Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool; and THE ANTI ECSTATIC MACHINES and Heads May Roll, Matt’s Gallery, London. Drew’s work has been exhibited internationally including at Adelaide Festival, Australia; Lofoten International Arts Festival, Norway; and in Hayward Touring exhibitions British Art Show 8 and Shonky: The Aesthetics of Awkwardness. He has been commissioned to create video works for public spaces including Art on the Underground, London and Focal Point Gallery, Southend-on-Sea. The installation KAPUT (2015) was acquired by the Arts Council Collection. Since the 1990s Benedict Drew has performed in improvising ensembles, programmed concerts and club nights, and was briefly the director of the cultural charity London Musicians Collective. Drew has released several records on labels including Mana Records and Kaleidoscope, and often collaborates with other artists and musicians. He launched his own label, Thanet Tape Centre, in May 2020 and regularly makes work for radio. Benedict Drew is a Lecturer in Fine Art at Slade School of Fine Art, University College London and is represented by Matt’s Gallery, London.
Antonio Roberts
Antonio Roberts is an artist and curator based in Birmingham, UK, working primarily with video, code, and sound. He is critically engaged with the themes surrounding network culture and in his practice explores how technology continues to shape ideas of creation, ownership, and authorship. As a performing visual artist and musician he utilises live coding techniques to demystify technology and reveal its design decisions, limitations, and creative potential. His work has been featured at galleries and festivals including, Furtherfield (2013, 2019), Tate Britain (2014, 2015, 2020), Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art in Chicago (2014), Birmingham Open Media (2015-2016), Jerwood Arts (2016), Whitney Museum of American Art (2017), Green Man Festival (2017), Barbican (2018), Victoria and Albert Museum (2019), Czurles Nelson Gallery (2019), and New Art Exchange (2021). He has curated exhibitions and projects including GLI.TC/H Birmingham (2011), Bring Your Own Beamer (2012, 2013), Stealth (2015), No Copyright Infringement Intended (2017), Copy Paste (2020), and Rules of Engagement (2020). He is part of a-n's Artist Council, is an Artist Advisor for Jerwood Arts and from 2014 - 2019 he was Curator at Vivid Projects where he produced the Black Hole Club artist development programme.
Michael Lightborne
Michael Lightborne is an artist based in Birmingham and Cork. He works with video, sound and print, and has exhibited around the UK and internationally, in exhibitions and film festivals. His work engages with questions of landscape, popular culture, memory, and technology. He is currently exploring the viability of ‘psychetecture’, a concept used in the 1980s comic Mister X to describe the psychological effects of architecture and urban forms. He has released two albums on the Gruenrekorder label, His sound work has been played on BBC Radio, NTS Radio, Resonance FM, WFMU, Framework Radio, and numerous other international radio stations. His films have been shown at Cork Film Festival, Glasgow Film Festival, Art Festival at Hay, MOMus Experimental Center for the Arts in Greece, Vivid Projects and Eastside Projects in Birmingham, Flatpack Film Festival, Portland Unknown Film Festival, UCL Urban Laboratory in London, Herbert Gallery in Coventry, Arquiteturas Film Festival in Lisbon, amongst others.
about.
Concrete Cinema is supported by the University of Warwick, and emerges from Warwick research into urban space and the moving image. Funded jointly by the Sustainable Cities GRP (Global Research Priority) and the Arts Impact Fund at the University of Warwick, this project responds directly to research generated by The Projection Project and Sensing the City, both AHRC funded research projects based at Warwick between 2014 and 2020. Concrete Cinema relates specifically to Michael Pigott's work on the moving image and urban space, which can be found in the following outputs:
- Urban Sensographies: The Ignorant Camera collection of film and sound works by Michael Lightborne.
- 'The Ignorant Camera', in Urban Sensographies, ed. Nicolas Whybrow (London and New York: Routledge, 2021).
- Michael Pigott and Richard Wallace, 'A New "Wild West" of Projection' in Practices of Projection: Histories and Technologies, ed. Virginia Crisp and Gabriel Menotti (Oxford: Oxford University Press: 2020).
Concrete Cinema is part of Coventry Biennial and CineCov - a 12-month programme that will transform the whole of Coventry into a cinema for its year as UK City of Culture. Brought to you by Flatpack on behalf of Film Hub Midlands with support from the BFI using funds from the National Lottery.
Concrete Cinema 2022 documentation
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