LIAF 2021: join the finalists of the 2022 Arts Foundation Futures Awards for screenings and discussion of their work
[ID: Purple event poster with animation stills in background.]
Doors: 5:45pm (Event starts promptly at 6pm)
Tickets: £8.00 General Admission; £6.00 concessions
The London International Animation Festival - the UK’s largest and longest-running animation festival - is back with 10 days of amazing screenings, talks and visits from local and international animators with our first fully hybrid edition. We are especially excited to return to the Horse Hospital for the first time since 2019 with 3 nights of talks and screenings from several of the world’s best animators.
This one-off event will include the chance to see selected works from the diverse practices of the four finalists of the prestigious 2022 Arts Foundation Futures Awards: Savinder Bual, Sophie Koko-Gate, Mary Stark and Petra Széman will introduce in person a curated programme of their work and discuss their influences and processes concluding with a guided Q&A. Full artist bios below.
The artists will introduce in person, a curated programme of their work, and discuss their respective influences and creative processes exploring expanded and experimental animation as art practice. The event will conclude with a guided Q&A, hosted by art writer and publisher Jamie Sutcliffe.
The judges for this year's award for Animation are time-based media artist, Birgitta Hosea, Irish Director, Johnny Kelly and curator Edwin Rostron, who says:
“The four AFFA 2022 Animation finalists' work demonstrates the great range and breadth of contemporary animation practice in the UK, and that the art form continues to exist in vibrant and exciting ways both on and beyond the screen. Animation is a way of thinking as much as it is a set of processes, and each of the four artists has pursued highly individual and original ways of thinking about animation.”
The Arts Foundation Futures Awards 2022 supports and celebrates artists for both their work to date and future development. The recipient of the £10,000 award for Animation, supported by The David Collins Foundation, will be announced along with awards in four other artforms (Materials Innovation, Music for Change, Theatre-Makers, and Visual Arts) at a celebration event in late January 2022 - with all finalists receiving £1,000 awards towards their artistic practice.
To find out more about the artists and all AFFA 2022 finalists, please visit The Arts Foundation website: www.artsfoundation.co.uk
Petra Szemán, ‘Monomyth: Gaiden/Master of Two Worlds’, film still, 2020 (Courtesy of the artist)
[ID: Anime-style animation still. A pink-haired woman lies back on a neatly made bed in a modern/traditional Japanese bedroom. She looks at an object floating above her. The object is made up of an arrangement of panels which seem to show stills from a film.]
Savinder Bual: Savinder Bual is fascinated by the mechanics and illusory qualities of cinema and early animation - ‘‘We live in a time where physical things are disappearing. This has drawn me to juxtapose tangible everyday materials with the relative immateriality of video.’’ In Javasu (2019) a sea monster weaves and bends through wooden rollers, drawing upon histories in which the pineapple and moving panoramas triggered the public’s imagination of faraway lands. Punch (2019) and Walk Cycle (2018) see Disney-esque illustrations animated through automatons, while Pinjekan (2015) animates illustrated wings with air-powered devices made with wood, cotton, steel and Japanese Shoji paper.
Sophie Koko-Gate: Sophie Koko is driven by non-traditional character narrative, exploring the potential-filled gap between experimental and mainstream animation. Seeing her practice as a parallel existence that runs alongside ours, Slug Life (2018) centres around Tanya, a curious woman who after exhausting all options on the post-apocalyptic land she inhabits, has developed a taste for non-human lovers. Half Wet (2015) explores ideas around ageing - specifically the loss of water or evaporation of one’s self as we near death. The main character, Gus, talks directly to us as he approaches his 25th birthday in the shadow of an unrequited love.
Mary Stark: Mary Stark’s journey to complete her PhD in 2020 began while studying Embroidery at Manchester Metropolitan University. A fourth generation Mancunian needlewoman, she experimented with sound and video, and began to consider editing as a way to ‘stitch’ different elements together to create new meanings. Her films today respond to the history of terminologies, techniques and apparatus from textile practice adopted by filmmaking in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, and the forgotten women who worked in the cutting rooms of early cinema.
Petra Szemán: Gateshead-based Hungarian animator Petra Szemán is influenced by the early filmography of Japanese director Makoto Shinkai, and watching the works of Hungarian experimental animator Marcell Jankovics while growing up in post-communist Hungary. Petra’s work follows the journeys of Yourself, a protagonist on a pilgrimage through landscapes that have become oversaturated with fiction. A deeply personal avatar, Yourself is used to interrogate the potential of animation to challenge binary fictions. A body tied to animation posits a realm of possibilities, and Petra asks ‘‘rather than inquiring into its relationship to the real, it may be better to ask: what new territories may be opened up?’’
[ID: Red text on white background. Logo for ‘The Arts Foundation Futures Awards’