Press Release
Frieze Film 2007 announced
Frieze Film 2007: Artists Announced
Frieze Film presents four short film commissions from some of the most exciting and challenging international artists working today: Oliver Payne and Nick Relph, Wilhelm Sasnal, David Shrigley and Kara Walker.
Each of the films will be premiered in the on-site auditorium at Frieze Art Fair and broadcast daily on Channel 4 television in the prime time ‘3 Minute Wonder’ slots during the week of the fair. Frieze Film is sponsored by BMW and supported by Channel 4 and Arts & Business.
Frieze Film recognises and showcases the increasing role of film as a medium for contemporary artists.
Neville Wakefield, curator of Frieze Film comments, “Film has always been an important component of Frieze Art Fair and this year we are moving into new territory by collaborating with Channel 4. Frieze Film have commissioned artists who seduce, amuse, provoke and entertain – we want to bring this new work to as wide an audience as possible. Television is the perfect ‘Trojan horse’ delivery system in that it has the potential to deliver the challenging and often difficult artistic content in a form that is both familiar and commanding of our attention.”
Frieze Film is part of the highly acclaimed curatorial programme that runs annually at Frieze Art Fair.
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Editors’ Notes
Oliver Payne & Nick Relph
British artists Oliver Payne and Nick Relph manipulate a range of visual material to create films that meld contemporary culture and artist’s video, referencing documentary film, music video and surveillance footage. Their subject matter is often drawn from their antagonistic relationship to the social and physical architecture of London. Bleak, gritty and laden with teenage angst, their work is at the same time elegiac and wryly funny.
Wilhelm Sasnal
Best known for his painting, Polish artist Wilhelm Sasnal focuses on the details of the drab and often overlooked landscapes that surround him to articulate emotional analogues to moments that linger as much in the mind as they do in reality. His subjects often interrogate the way in which we inhabit the space between public and private spheres and the ways in which music and image infiltrate our interior landscapes. Sasnal attributes his interest in painting to music, which consistently plays a key part in his films, providing the narrative structure for an abstract language of sensation fed by social and political events.
David Shrigley
British artist David Shrigley has worked with various media, though he is best known for his mordantly humorous cartoons describing various conditions of ineptitude and the bizarre. His work, which bears reference to Outsider Art, often focuses on the infiltration of violence and the effects of morbid curiosity on the mundane. His films, which have included music videos for Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy and Blur, are animations of the narratives implicit in the drawings. These tales of curiosity and misadventure and their deadpan humour stay with the viewer long after the last frame has disappeared.
Kara Walker
American artist Kara Walker tackles issues of black history, race, gender and stereotype. She uses the traditionally proper medium of silhouette and turns it on its head with unruly cut-paper characters who fornicate and inflict violence upon one another. Recently, these works have developed into puppet-show films enacting tragicomic pornographic scenarios of illegitimacy, degradation and compulsive persuasion. Drawing on the historical realism of slavery and the fantastical space of the romance novel, Walker’s films present seductive, nightmarish fictions.
Frieze Film is curated by Neville Wakefield, sponsored by BMW and supported by Channel 4 and Arts & Business.
Frieze Film commissions will be broadcast Monday 8 October - Thursday 11 October in the ‘3 Minute Wonder’ slot at 7.55pm which follows directly after Channel 4 News.