As well as many screenings, White curated a number of gallery exhibitions. Invisible Mend was developed in collaboration with LUX and was partly inspired by VALIE EXPORT’s 1977 film Invisible Adversaries, which was an important reference point for White. The selection of works was characteristic too, in reframing of the history of avant-garde and experimental cinema through a queer, feminist lens.

The exhibition was complemented by a programme of screenings and performances, including a rooftop screening of the VALIE EXPORT film.

“Since the beginning of the twentieth century artists making moving images have exploited industrial cinema as ‘found’ images to be reinterpreted, manipulated and represented as art. Invisible Mend, a group show of mainly young artists, presents a collection of works that seem to strategise in a similar way while actually drawing their material from radically different sources, simulating the look of the ‘found’ or exploring as much a set of radical (over) identifications with their subjects as a set of formal, political or historical questions.

“The works vary wildly in their aesthetics but what they have in common is an exploitation of the invisible: refutations of the permissible in the name of personal or political expression, a rewriting of history and to travel through time and space, through imaginary forays against and within dominant culture, escaping into new landscapes of desire. Criticality is manifested through an ebullience that replaces strict analysis with intuition, an interplay of emotional registers and often a disarming sense of celebration.” – I.W., exhibition press release

Details of works in exhibition

Chrissy Coscioni, Thermoplastic

UK/USA, 2006, 16mm on video, installation, 10mins

A torrid montage of sound and image seemingly from the 1970s yokes together popular period idioms, apocalypses and artistic practice. Newsreel, television shows and material actually shot by the artist in the late 1980s together fuse the ‘present’ with the up-rush of a faux split-screen utopian past.

Jasmina Fekovic, Goddess… Whatever happened to love?

NL/Cyprus, 2004, video, single-channel projection, 6mins

Maya Deren is relocated from her outstanding, seminal film At Land (1944) to Cyprus, the mythical birthplace of the goddess Aphrodite and transmigrates into the body of the actress and model Anouck Lepère. Through appropriated footage and uncanny pastiche, Deren/Aphrodite/Lepère magically heals the wounds of this divided island.

Jonty Semper, Kenotaphion

Audio CD

A presentation of newsreel and broadcast archive recordings of the 2minute silences from Remembrance Sunday services in London, dating back to 1926. The title is taken from the Greek words from which the word cenotaph is derived and literally means 'empty tomb'.

James Richards, Untitled merchandise (lovers and dealers)

UK, machine knitted nylon blankets, 2007

One of a series of six knitted bedspreads each of which depicts a different lover or art dealer of renowned painter Keith Haring, photographed alongside him during his meteoric rise to international success in the 1980s. Manufactured by an American company that specializes in commemorative blankets for the families of soldiers on service abroad, the series transposes its souvenir template from those on military duty to the more private battlegrounds of class, race, desire and ambition.

Elisabeth Subrin, Shulie

USA, 1997, video, 37mins

“A cinematic doppelganger without precedent, Elisabeth Subrin's Shulie uncannily and systematically bends time and cinematic code alike, projecting the viewer 30 years into the past to rediscover a woman out of time and time out of joint- and in Subrin's words, 'to investigate the mythos and residue of the late 1960s.' Staging an extended act of homage as well as a playful, provocative confounding of filmic propriety, Subrin and her creative collaborator Kim Soss resurrect a little-known 1967 documentary portrait of a young Chicago art student who a few years later would become a notable figure in Second Wave feminism and the author of the radical 1970 manifesto, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution. Reflecting on her life and times, Shulie functions as a prism for refracting questions of gender, race and class that resonate in our era as in hers, while through painstaking mediation, Subrin makes manifest the eternal return of film.” - Mark MacElhatten and Gavin Smith, curators, Views from the Avant Garde. 35th New York Film Festival

Event details

30 May 2007

Invisible Mend Salon: Shulie

LUX office

On the occasion of the Invisible Mend exhibition, LUX Salon takes the opportunity to screen Elizabeth Subrin’s Shulie in a FEMALE ONLY study salon. Subrin resurrected a little-known 1967 documentary portrait of a young Chicago art student, Shulamith Firestone, who a few years later would become a notable figure in Second Wave feminism and the author of the radical 1970 manifesto, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution. Subrin’s version re-creates the original, shot for shot, and in the process arcs 40 years of feminisim. Using the film as a catalyst to form a discussion group we will look at the issues that resonate through the film; about identity, the construction of histories and how they reflect on the current interest in feminist work and assess the significance. Facilitated by Jackie Holt and Emma Hedditch.

7 June 2007

Invisible Mend Salon: Camcorder Devotion

LUX office

A collection of videos which are very much about the camera/editor as an off-screen character with an ambiguous or subverted relationship to the events being depicted in the video. While often awkward or obsessive in tone the material shown is also about fantasy, and people’s use of lo-tech and simple technology for escapism. including work by James Richards, Steve Reinke, Anne McGuire, Matthew Probert and Kim Fielding. Curated and presented by James Richards.

Sunday 10 June 2007

Invisible Mend Performance: Emma Hart & Benedict Drew, James Richards

Arcola Theatre

An evening of live works that cross between cinema and performance, strategies of appropriation and magical formalism. James Richards presents a new work of found sound material. In Emma Hart & Benedict Drew’s Untitled 2, a 50-foot length of film with black and white frames is projected by running the filmstrip from the projector and through the strings of an electric guitar held by Drew who stands in front of the screen. The string is plucked each time a splice passes. The effect is disconcerting as the increasingly staccato flashing of the projector, in tension with the distorting guitar strings, takes the viewer into a territory that is immediately personal, sexual and mesmerizing.

15 June 2007

VALIE EXPORT: Invisible Adversaries (Unsichtbare Gegner)

LUX office, rooftop screening

“EXPORT’s seminal first feature Invisible Adversaries is a tour-de-force of radical paranoia presented in a special rooftop screening overlooking the city. Anna wakes to a radio signal that she interprets as an alien invasion. Her investigations are an exegesis on the self, mental instability, the media and sexual politics. "The film feels a little as if Godard were reincarnated as a woman and decided to make a feminist version of The Invasion of the Body Snatchers.” (Amy Taubin)

Presented in collaboration with Cinenova and with thanks to Faction Films.

21 - 23 June 2007

Interiors, Ursula Meyer

2 Willow Road, Hampstead, London

Shot to a high finish in the house at 2 Willow Road designed by the architect Ernö Goldfinger, the location for its exhibition here, two women – one old, one young – move through a set of modernist rooms, across hallways and up and down stairs, never meeting, never speaking. They variously gravitate towards and linger around what looks like one of the British sculptor Barbara Hepworth’s infamous, intimate works. Presented as part of Architecture Week 2007.

Further material

Download invitation card to Invisible Mend