Six Pillars podcast of the interview broadcast August 20th, with BFI-once-NFT head of programming Sheila Whittaker. In her role she visited in Iran yearly for 25 years. Now in protest over the treatment of film maker Jafar Panahi, Whittaker will no longer visit. She explains the season and why and how it was programmed.
Tag Archives: film
Six Pillars – The Experimental Film Society, Ireland
Rouzbeh Rashidi, founder of The Experimental Film Society visits the ResonanceFM studios from Ireland to discuss his influences, his own films with titles such as ‘Bipedality’ and working various forms – even toy Barbie cameras! Rouzbeh was taking part in London’s The Underground Film Festival.
This show was originally broadcast on 13th Dec 2010.
Six Pillars – Shallow Water, Deep Skin
Acid Drops - 2005
Still: political activist and entomologist Shahin Nawai in 'Shallow Water, Deep Skin'
Nooshin Farhid, video artist, whose solo show Shallow Water, Deep Skin is now running at East London’s The Agency Gallery discusses her work and process with us back in 2008. Over the years Farhid has co-curated a number of exhibitions including “Use this Kind of Sky” and has exhibited the world over gathering together a considerable body of work and lengthy resumé.
Farhid’s videos employ different subjects and scenarios that thread together with a connecting sense of agitation and grit. We discuss her interests and how Fahid’s ideas form which interestingly harks back to her own experiences as an immigrant settling in the UK. The unwillingness to settle for what is on offer, something that is evident in all her work, reflects Farhid’s views on the current state of society, politics and ideology. Though not overtly political, (for this inevitably enables privileged authority to manipulate the artist into the cul de sac of irrelevance), her work picks away at those daily familiar stabilising forces within the space of the everyday and also within contemporary art itself.
Farhid’s work, eclectic and conceptually nomadic, uses the camera as a notebook collecting fragments of random events and chance meetings that collectively question the incessant drive towards normality and conformity. Farhid appropriates other ‘dumbing’ forms of popular media: soaps, reality TV, Bollywood, MTV, raw material welded together in fragments, each one activating and qualifying its predecessor. This process produces a contemporary surreal space that re-presents the familiar in that which is astonishing and invites the viewer to reconsider. In her most recent work Shallow Water, Deep Skin, featuring political activist and entomologist Shahin Nawai in ‘Shallow Water, Deep Skin’ Farhid reaches the apex of her observations of the human disconnect by melding together the swarming world of nature and human kinds’ own busy, teeming concerns.
Most of all, Farhid turns out to be a quirky and humorous talent, who works as both artist and curator, resident and outsider. This interview was first broadcast from the ResonanceFM studios in 2008.
Art Monthly Show 10th December 2010
Richard Hylton discusses films by Ruth McClennan’s, Anarcadia and Capital on show at John Hansard Gallery in Southampton.
Sophia Phoca discusses her feature from the December/January issue of Art Monthly entitled Filming the Alternative on independent artist filmmakers. She also raises concerns about the structure of film funding in the UK as arts funding bodies are subject to funding cuts by the new coalition government. As the number of funding pots dwindles, Britain’s more individual, and unique artists will increasingly find that they do not fit the mold. Phoca sights examples of artists who received funding in the past who are unlikely to receive it now.
Art Monthly magazine’s talk programme on Resonance FM started in February 2009 and is broadcast on the second Friday of each month at 5pm. In each show Art Monthly critics discuss their writing in the latest issue.
The programme is hosted by Matt Hale who has worked at Art Monthly since 1991 and produced by Frederika Whitehead.
Previous episodes are available on Art Monthly’s website www.artmonthly.co.uk/events.htm
Art Monthly magazine offers an informed and comprehensive guide to the latest developments in contemporary art.
Fiercely independent, Art Monthly’s news and opinion sections provide regular information and polemics on the
international art scene. It also offers In-depth interviews and features; reviews of exhibitions, performances, films and books; art law; auction reports and exhibition listings
Art Monthly magazine is indispensable reading!
Special magazine subscription offer for Resonance 104.4 listeners.Subscribe now and save 40% on the cover price at
Six Pillars – The First UK Iranian Film Festival
November saw the launch of the London’s first Iranian Film Festival: UKIFF.
In late October we met with one of the volunteers, Costas Sarkas, at one of UKIFF’s networking events, to find out what it was all about.
Six Pillars – Leeds Diasporic Film Series
Sanaz Raj discusses her interest in Iranian film and a week of full length film screenings running in conjunction with the Leeds International Film Festival. The week, called the Iranian Diasporic Film Series presents a variety of film: from a documentary about the Shah’s widow to a fiction about a lesbian refugee from Iran who takes on the identity of a dead male acquaintance.
Sanaz and Fari discuss the screenings and accompanying talks, as we well as ‘Certified Copy‘ Abbas Kiarostami’s latest film set in Italy, starring Juliette Binoche.
Art Monthly 14th May 2010
It Was What it Was: Modern Ruins– Gilda Williams discusses her feature in the May issue of Art Monthly pinpointing the difference between a building that has become a ruin and one that has become derelict. She uses examples of artists that have made works that hinge on this difference. She is joined by Maria Walsh who discusses the films of Hannah Sawtell developing ideas on Entropy and the digital..
Art Monthly magazine’s talk programme on Resonance FM started in February 2009 and is broadcast on the second Friday of each month at 5pm. In each show Art Monthly critics discuss their writing in the latest issue.
The programme is presented by Matt Hale who has worked at Art Monthly since 1991
Previous episodes are available on Art Monthly’s website www.artmonthly.co.uk/events.htm
Art Monthly magazine offers an informed and comprehensive guide to the latest developments in contemporary art.
Fiercely independent, Art Monthly’s news and opinion sections provide regular information and polemics on the international art scene. It also offers In-depth interviews and features; reviews of exhibitions, performances, films and books; art law; auction reports and exhibition listings
Art Monthly magazine is indispensable reading!
Special magazine subscription offer for Resonance 104.4 listeners.
Subscribe now and save 40% on the cover price at www.artmonthly.co.uk/sub09
Six Pillars – Insight & Rakshan Bani Etemad
A season at the British Film Institute of the work of female film director Rakhshan Bani-Etemad. Organised by small not-for-profit company Insight, the season was accompanied by masterclasses given by Bani-Etemad herself and marks the first ever comprehensive screening outside of Iran of her work.
David Omid Alamouti discusses Insight’s alternative models of film-making and the singular style of Bani-Etemad, masterclasses with Mike Leigh and Polish film.
Music by rap artist Reveal and Simorgh linked to Insight through a Contemporary Iranian Music event at Camden Underworld later that month that featured in the Bani Etemad workshops in a student film
