RePost Society from Fari Bradley
_______________________________________________________________________________________ A phone films a smart phone. Your smart phone is at once a news aggregator, radio station, protest platform, game console and more. The complexities of having immediate, omnipresent access to this tool of widely different uses in our lives hasn't been fully explored; what we know and what we do with the phone is riddled with consequences, even the ones grown from an actions' own futility. To illustrate this, the film exmaines what the Syrian American Medical Society (SAMS) and Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) have called a “stranglehold” on the town of Madaya. Since in July 2015, people have died from starvation and malnutrition as a result, they say, of the Syrian government’s position. Now, at the close of 2016 when food shortages have worsened, the difficult dichotomy of knowing injustice exists without being able to effectively do anything about it has increasingly become a very contemporary condition of our times. Reposting a tweet is, to some extent, spreading this ineffectiveness on social media so that even by raising awareness, we are at the same time raising levels of this condition of ineffectiveness which afflicts all of us, aside from those working directly for these causes. Punctured by real time sounds of a stomach rumbling, the piece explores a limbo we are in when regarding reposting. Are we helping, is it ineffective or are we essentially working to numb people to despair altogether, while passing on to our followers the stress of knowing they are doing nothing directly to help and the pain this dichotomy incurs. “Last year, unspeakable images of Madaya’s suffering emerged in the media and we hoped that would trigger action to finally bring lifesaving aid into the town,” said Elise Baker of PHR. “But UN humanitarian convoys that finally reached Madaya failed to provide the population with enough food, medicine and medical equipment. “Dozens of Madaya’s residents died because of these failures. And each day under siege brings the rest of Madaya’s population one day closer to death.”
You can donate here, or the PHP direct, below handinhandforsyria.org.uk/madaya/
http://physiciansforhumanrights.org/
Variations for a Space and its History from Fari Bradley
_______________________________________________________________________________________ Variations for a Space and its History - an Art Dubai commission for the not-for-profit 'Commissions' section, 2015 by Fari Bradley and Chris Weaver. A trained and two untrained voices intervene in the solemn atmosphere of the art fair at different intervals. From a top balcony at the entrance, an opera singer begins, and then takes the elevator to ground floor, singing an ode written by the artists, to the mostly unsung archeologist Beatrice de Cardi, then aged 100 yrs. De Cardi (Beatrice, after Dante's muse Beatrice) pioneered the archaeological scene across the Middle East. In the 60s no one was sending digs over to the Middle East as it was considered a void as far as archaeology was concerned. Beatrice persevered with her illiterate guide and together they found links between Fujeirah and the Indus Valley civilsation, amongst many others, gaining her awards from the Sheikhdom for her work. As the singer progresses from room to room the acoustics change and the ode becomes increasingly tonal until at the base of the stairs they entered a darkened space around an apparently fallen piece of ancient architecture, a muqarnas that holds up the Coppola of a mosque.
The tones of the space resonate and flux continually, interrupted by tones from an imagined architecture, a past 'reality' on the very same spot. Here the untrained voices join in an almost feral improvisation with the tones of the architecture, making use of the acoustics of the space and referring to the immovability of the 'presence' of the spot, despite man's transient constructs, continual since the beginning of time. The work is an iteration of a piece previously performed for the International Symposium of Electronic Art, Dubai 2015.
Choir Practice - Variations for Rooms and a Tone from Fari Bradley
_______________________________________________________________________________________ At an arts space in the rural fringes of Dubai's city centre, a group of architects, most of whom do not normally sing, explore the architecture of the space with voice and hands. An amplified audio installation by Chris Weaver and Fari Bradley, the choir was comprised of architects, engineers and urban planners from different Emirates around the UAE, created for Tashkeel (where with was filmed by Bradley) and the International Symposium of Electronic Arts 2014. The choir followed the rolling tones generated by the building interacting with the space. At both performances the audience listened rather than looked via the mediums of a partial wall between the audience and the choir, or individual eye-masks which then allowed the choir to circumnavigate the audience while singing back to the space.
What Doesn't Decay from Fari Bradley
_______________________________________________________________________________________ What doesn't decay… finds a correlation in the degradation of cine film and the human capacity to recollect. Created during her one year residency with Sound and Music at no.w.here in London, the installation creates a third space where the celluloid and audio tape are protagonists in the edification of, and subsequently rewriting of memories; as the film and tape decay so does the fidelity to fact with time. The installation consists of a powered cine film projector, a reel to reel tape recorder and a vintage speaker and a small digital, hand-held projector that projects a smaller image, overlapping partially with the main cine film projection. Background For a period in the 1960s and 70s, when cine film and reel to reel tapes were at the forefront of technology, UK and Iran (where Bradley was born) shared a degree of unity in how they looked and sounded, as well as how they were portrayed in film and audio, both countries being then in ‘the analogue’ or pre-digital state. After 1979, due to an ongoing feud with the UK and USA over oil prices and per cent age shares in exports, Iran drastically cut ties with the West, changed to an Islamic republic and never looked or sounded the same again. For many of those who left due to the onset of the Islamic revolution, secular Iran remains an isolated period of 70s design and technology, one now only to be found in old footage, vinyl, cassettes and photographs. However, in the UK too, with the onset of the digital age, the distinctive presence of 70s technology has since all but disappeared. For What does't decay..., Bradley spent a year experimenting with development processes and the degradation of cine film, using crude oil directly on the film stock itself and partially burning and melting it for before reshooting and reprocessing by hand. Bradley explores the degradation of film in a work that is shaped by the limitations of analogue colour cine-film processing in the digital age.
During the course of her one year residency at no.w.here, the sourcing of colour film for the copy/ transfer process became increasingly difficult. The disappearance of positive colour film stock from the market, and the demise of both the equipment to copy it with and places it can be copied in, manifests here in the reframing, the colouring and the purposeful degradation of the film. It is a disappearing medium. Simultaneously, ideas of the subjective nature of memory play out in the audio, captured by unidentified Iranian, English and American voices retelling experiences of sounds and design in the 70s. Irrespective of which country they were living in the recollections have a particular resonance with one another, each framed more by the era in which they were living than their country of residence at the time.
Your/ Our/ Their Story from Fari Bradley
_______________________________________________________________________________________ Pixellated imagery moves onto carefully over-layered imagery of 1970s oil fields and aerial views of Iran, the film follows the narrative of several voices. Each one is speaking to film maker Fari Bradley recounting their relationship with an Iran of the past and currently of the diaspora, live on radio. These conversations that happened off camera are at one intimate and immensely revealing, while the imagery plays on one of Bradley's oft-visited themes of both shared and borrowed memory, and the richness of celluloid.
Unwritten Women from Fari Bradley
_______________________________________________________________________________________ An exploratory, improvised piece using dance, paint, light and sound at RISC Global Cafe, Reading. I'm drawing out the top frequencies here to create a smelting of the piece while it plays out beneath, so that the khatak dancer doesn't lose her rhythm. There is a significance of the male voice calling out the time to our energetic dancer in red, while the dancers use red paint to create a shadow and light play in colour the background.
_______________________________________________________________________________________ A phone films a smart phone. Your smart phone is at once a news aggregator, radio station, protest platform, game console and more. The complexities of having immediate, omnipresent access to this tool of widely different uses in our lives hasn't been fully explored; what we know and what we do with the phone is riddled with consequences, even the ones grown from an actions' own futility. To illustrate this, the film exmaines what the Syrian American Medical Society (SAMS) and Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) have called a “stranglehold” on the town of Madaya. Since in July 2015, people have died from starvation and malnutrition as a result, they say, of the Syrian government’s position. Now, at the close of 2016 when food shortages have worsened, the difficult dichotomy of knowing injustice exists without being able to effectively do anything about it has increasingly become a very contemporary condition of our times. Reposting a tweet is, to some extent, spreading this ineffectiveness on social media so that even by raising awareness, we are at the same time raising levels of this condition of ineffectiveness which afflicts all of us, aside from those working directly for these causes. Punctured by real time sounds of a stomach rumbling, the piece explores a limbo we are in when regarding reposting. Are we helping, is it ineffective or are we essentially working to numb people to despair altogether, while passing on to our followers the stress of knowing they are doing nothing directly to help and the pain this dichotomy incurs. “Last year, unspeakable images of Madaya’s suffering emerged in the media and we hoped that would trigger action to finally bring lifesaving aid into the town,” said Elise Baker of PHR. “But UN humanitarian convoys that finally reached Madaya failed to provide the population with enough food, medicine and medical equipment. “Dozens of Madaya’s residents died because of these failures. And each day under siege brings the rest of Madaya’s population one day closer to death.”
You can donate here, or the PHP direct, below handinhandforsyria.org.uk/madaya/
http://physiciansforhumanrights.org/
Variations for a Space and its History from Fari Bradley
_______________________________________________________________________________________ Variations for a Space and its History - an Art Dubai commission for the not-for-profit 'Commissions' section, 2015 by Fari Bradley and Chris Weaver. A trained and two untrained voices intervene in the solemn atmosphere of the art fair at different intervals. From a top balcony at the entrance, an opera singer begins, and then takes the elevator to ground floor, singing an ode written by the artists, to the mostly unsung archeologist Beatrice de Cardi, then aged 100 yrs. De Cardi (Beatrice, after Dante's muse Beatrice) pioneered the archaeological scene across the Middle East. In the 60s no one was sending digs over to the Middle East as it was considered a void as far as archaeology was concerned. Beatrice persevered with her illiterate guide and together they found links between Fujeirah and the Indus Valley civilsation, amongst many others, gaining her awards from the Sheikhdom for her work. As the singer progresses from room to room the acoustics change and the ode becomes increasingly tonal until at the base of the stairs they entered a darkened space around an apparently fallen piece of ancient architecture, a muqarnas that holds up the Coppola of a mosque.
The tones of the space resonate and flux continually, interrupted by tones from an imagined architecture, a past 'reality' on the very same spot. Here the untrained voices join in an almost feral improvisation with the tones of the architecture, making use of the acoustics of the space and referring to the immovability of the 'presence' of the spot, despite man's transient constructs, continual since the beginning of time. The work is an iteration of a piece previously performed for the International Symposium of Electronic Art, Dubai 2015.
Choir Practice - Variations for Rooms and a Tone from Fari Bradley
_______________________________________________________________________________________ At an arts space in the rural fringes of Dubai's city centre, a group of architects, most of whom do not normally sing, explore the architecture of the space with voice and hands. An amplified audio installation by Chris Weaver and Fari Bradley, the choir was comprised of architects, engineers and urban planners from different Emirates around the UAE, created for Tashkeel (where with was filmed by Bradley) and the International Symposium of Electronic Arts 2014. The choir followed the rolling tones generated by the building interacting with the space. At both performances the audience listened rather than looked via the mediums of a partial wall between the audience and the choir, or individual eye-masks which then allowed the choir to circumnavigate the audience while singing back to the space.
What Doesn't Decay from Fari Bradley
_______________________________________________________________________________________ What doesn't decay… finds a correlation in the degradation of cine film and the human capacity to recollect. Created during her one year residency with Sound and Music at no.w.here in London, the installation creates a third space where the celluloid and audio tape are protagonists in the edification of, and subsequently rewriting of memories; as the film and tape decay so does the fidelity to fact with time. The installation consists of a powered cine film projector, a reel to reel tape recorder and a vintage speaker and a small digital, hand-held projector that projects a smaller image, overlapping partially with the main cine film projection. Background For a period in the 1960s and 70s, when cine film and reel to reel tapes were at the forefront of technology, UK and Iran (where Bradley was born) shared a degree of unity in how they looked and sounded, as well as how they were portrayed in film and audio, both countries being then in ‘the analogue’ or pre-digital state. After 1979, due to an ongoing feud with the UK and USA over oil prices and per cent age shares in exports, Iran drastically cut ties with the West, changed to an Islamic republic and never looked or sounded the same again. For many of those who left due to the onset of the Islamic revolution, secular Iran remains an isolated period of 70s design and technology, one now only to be found in old footage, vinyl, cassettes and photographs. However, in the UK too, with the onset of the digital age, the distinctive presence of 70s technology has since all but disappeared. For What does't decay..., Bradley spent a year experimenting with development processes and the degradation of cine film, using crude oil directly on the film stock itself and partially burning and melting it for before reshooting and reprocessing by hand. Bradley explores the degradation of film in a work that is shaped by the limitations of analogue colour cine-film processing in the digital age.
During the course of her one year residency at no.w.here, the sourcing of colour film for the copy/ transfer process became increasingly difficult. The disappearance of positive colour film stock from the market, and the demise of both the equipment to copy it with and places it can be copied in, manifests here in the reframing, the colouring and the purposeful degradation of the film. It is a disappearing medium. Simultaneously, ideas of the subjective nature of memory play out in the audio, captured by unidentified Iranian, English and American voices retelling experiences of sounds and design in the 70s. Irrespective of which country they were living in the recollections have a particular resonance with one another, each framed more by the era in which they were living than their country of residence at the time.
Your/ Our/ Their Story from Fari Bradley
_______________________________________________________________________________________ Pixellated imagery moves onto carefully over-layered imagery of 1970s oil fields and aerial views of Iran, the film follows the narrative of several voices. Each one is speaking to film maker Fari Bradley recounting their relationship with an Iran of the past and currently of the diaspora, live on radio. These conversations that happened off camera are at one intimate and immensely revealing, while the imagery plays on one of Bradley's oft-visited themes of both shared and borrowed memory, and the richness of celluloid.
Unwritten Women from Fari Bradley
_______________________________________________________________________________________ An exploratory, improvised piece using dance, paint, light and sound at RISC Global Cafe, Reading. I'm drawing out the top frequencies here to create a smelting of the piece while it plays out beneath, so that the khatak dancer doesn't lose her rhythm. There is a significance of the male voice calling out the time to our energetic dancer in red, while the dancers use red paint to create a shadow and light play in colour the background.
Terry Smith - Artist from Fari Bradley
_______________________________________________________________________________________
Seminal British artist Terry Smith discusses his work in this short film I created. From cutting into the plaster of derelict buildings to bleaching away words he has written on paper, Smith's work is medium-led and singular in style. Recently his choral projects have taken him across the world, yet he continues to hunt domestic spaces in which to sculpt his iconic plaster cutouts on the walls. In this interview Smith discusses his process and what makes the work dear to him.
I conducted this interview just before Smith's first major retrospective, a landmark show currently still on at the John Hansard Gallery, Southampton until January 21st 2012. Please note this film is composed of highlights, there is a longer, far more in depth version of the interview (audio only, as broadcast) on the Resonance104.4fm podcast page.
I conducted this interview just before Smith's first major retrospective, a landmark show currently still on at the John Hansard Gallery, Southampton until January 21st 2012. Please note this film is composed of highlights, there is a longer, far more in depth version of the interview (audio only, as broadcast) on the Resonance104.4fm podcast page.
