Available Light is a new touring commission devised by London based artist, writer and musician, Morgan Quaintance. Presented by Outlands Network, this year-long expanded exhibition explores notions of home and belonging in contemporary society. Expanding from themes in an eponymously titled new film work that comprises interviews with workers at the Edo Tokyo Open Air Architecture Museum in Tokyo, and fragments of conversations with renters in that city and London.
The project will also include new formal and conceptual elements, writing, and sound compositions developed by Quaintance. This core body of new work will be placed in a changing configuration alongside other contributions – music, spoken word and moving image – from a range of invited artists: at one venue a screening programme, at another, a static exhibition, a single performance, or a series of talks, at another still, a combination of all of the above.
Developing a bespoke touring format for Available Light, Quaintance questions the traditions of exhibition and presentation; refusing the monographic focus of the solo-show, resisting the ‘one-shot’ logic of the film screening, and the ‘same show, different town’ conventions of touring theatre or music production. Across a series of dates in the UK and Europe, rather than adhering to the cookie-cutter demands of the touring circuit, Available Light accommodates collaboration and contingency in a format defined by the changing contours of an active artist practice.
At Attenborough Centre for the Creative Arts, the programme will be a multi-screen sound and moving image performance, dispersed across the interior theatre space. Georgian born and London-based artist and filmmaker Sophio Medoidze will present readings and images from her new monograph Bastard Sun, a book featuring a collection of photographs taken after the civil unrest in Georgia in the 1990s. The duo of Japan-born and London-based filmmaker Chiemi Shimada and British composer Jamie Man will present the performance Celestial Palpitations, a new work for recorded voice, analogue slide projector and electronics.
A group of musicians including Benjin (strings), Millips (samples and electronics) and Pharaoh Russell (drums) will perform live, playing new compositions by Quaintance and improvisations throughout the programme, accompanied by video fragments that are newly shot and also taken from the titular film.
