MATHEW BUCKINGHAM : THE SPIRIT AND THE LETTER

Camden Art Centre - Galleries 1,2 and Reading Room
Artist: Mathew Buckingham
Curator: Mark Godfrey
Date(s): Till 1 July 2007

Matthew Buckingham, one of today’s most significant critical artists, presents three new film and video works at Camden Arts Centre and a site-specific participative installation. Buckingham investigates history and its representation, concerned with addressing present day realities such as the impact of globalisation and colonialism. He has long been praised for the formal elegance of his films and his thoughtful approach to their installations.

Buckingham’s new video installation The Spirit and the Letter premieres at Camden Arts Centre following a research residency at the Slade School of Art. It is based on the writer and social reformer Mary Wollstonecraft (1759 – 1797), best known for her books on education and on the inequality between the rights of men and women. Wollstonecraft’s turbulent life is often read more closely than her writing, and her status has been contested by generations of feminist thinkers. Buckingham’s video will present her as a kind of ghost whose legacy remains unsettled. Wollstonecraft appears as if walking on the ceiling of an inverted 18th-century interior. The video is projected to fill the wall of a gallery which in turn appears as if inverted.

Everything I Need follows the psychoanalyst and radical feminist Charlotte Wolff (1897 – 1986) who trained as a doctor in Berlin, and was part of a circle of intellectuals that included Walter Benjamin. Wolff escaped Nazi Germany in 1933 and during her exile in Paris and London, wrote some of the first books about same-sex relationships. She was embraced as a figurehead in the 1970s by the lesbian movement in Berlin, where she returned in 1974 to present aspects of her research. Buckingham’s video was shot on a retired plane of the sort that made trans-European flights in the 1970s. As images of its plush interior unfold, a text is narrated drawing viewers to imagine Wolff’s thoughts during her journey back to Berlin.

Buckingham’s third new piece One Second in Leeds, a 16mm film projection, concerns Louis Aimée Augustin Le Prince (1842 – c. 1890). Le Prince invented a camera which could record moving pictures some years before the Lumières, but having made some very short films in New York and Leeds, he mysteriously disappeared from a train near to Dijon. Buckingham shot his film at the exact location in Leeds where Le Prince filmed in the late 1880s. The film is accompanied by a textual component which discusses Le Prince’s achievements, and the desire for moving images in the late 19th-century.

In a site specific installation Specularia, Buckingham invites visitors to engage with the architecture of Camden Arts Centre, connecting the very fabric of the building to wider historical events. He considers the materials, labour and industrial methods used in its construction and the changing function of Camden Arts Centre. This work is the result of a collaboration with students from the Slade School of Art. The Camden Arts Centre Specularia is the second of a series of works where Buckingham responds to the architecture of the gallery in which he exhibits. The first version of Specularia was realised at the Kunstmuseum St Gallen in 2005.

Together, these four works indicate Buckingham’s diverse interests, and his varied approach to installation. One thread running through the works is his concern with the political legacy of historical figures associated with feminism; another is his investigation of the history of the very mediums that he deploys - photograph and film.

After Camden Arts Centre, the exhibition will tour to FRAC Bourgogne Dijon; Dundee Contemporary Arts; Henry Art Gallery, Seattle and Des Moines Art Center, Iowa. A new four-book boxed set is published with specially-commissioned texts and a limited edition print produced by Matthew Buckingham will be available in the Bookshop.

The exhibition at Camden Arts Centre is curated by Mark Godfrey, Lecturer in History and Theory of Art at the Slade.

The Spirit and the Letter is being co-commissioned by Film and Video Umbrella, London and Camden Arts Centre in association with the other venues. Everything I Need is the culmination of research conducted during Buckingham’s DAAD residency.

Contact:
Camden Arts Centre
Arkwright Road
London NW3 6DG
T: +44 (0)20 7472 5500
Website: www.camdenartscentre.org

Opening times:
Tuesday - Sunday: 10am-6pm
Wednesdays late 10am–9pm
Closed Mondays and Bank Holidays
Admission free
Tube Stations: Finchley Road/Hampstead Tube

Funded by: Arts Council England and Camden Council

Image Credits: Still from The Spirit and the Letter, 2007. Continuous video projection with sound, electrified chandelier, mirror. Dimensions variable. Courtesy of the artist and Murray Guy, New York

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