Un-spooling: artists and cinema

UnSpooling – Artists & Cinema, is a large and ambitious group exhibition that straddles two giant bodies of reference – art and cinema – showing 19 international artists:

Michaël Borremans, Cartune Xprez, David Claerbout, Sally Golding, Ben Gwilliam & Matt Wand, Roman Kirschner, Kerry Laitala, Wayne Lloyd, Sheena Macrae, Elizabeth McAlpine, Juhana Moisander, Alex Pearl, Greg Pope, Mario Rossi, Gebhard Sengmüller, Harald Smykla, Ming Wong and Stefan Zeyen.

The artists' featured present current reflections and interpretations of cinema and new possibilities of future cinematic production, spectacle and storytelling; and gathers a wide range of works that use or abandon the usual conventions of cinema, such as celluloid, digital video, motion, and time. Cinema is explored in an alternative range of artistic strategies, through sound, chemistry, gesture, spoken-word, painting, drawing, and sculpture.

This exhibition includes a number of new commissions that cut to the heart of cinema bringing out its hybrid anarchistic side, these include Stefan Zeyen's site-specific fly-poster piece Weekend (2010); Alex Pearl's lo-fi film series, Pearlville (2010); Wayne Lloyd's spoken-word and drawing performance, Hell is a City (2010); Juhana Moisander's series of uncanny video interventions; and Mario Rossi's new restaurant canopy, Thief of Baghdad (2010).

Alongside these, cinema gets a great deal of recycling and rehashing by acclaimed Singaporean artist Ming Wong, in his 'world cinema' piece, Life and Death in Venice (2009); Elizabeth McAlpine's Hyena Stomp (2006); Sheena Macrae's remix of Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey in Odyssey (2006); and Gebhard Sengmüller's installation Slide Movie (2006).

Elsewhere, artists unite themselves with the cinematic more readily including Harald Smykla's Movie Protocol series; Roman Kirschner's Roots (2005-06); Michaël Borremans' The German (2004-07), and David Claerbout's Bordeaux Piece (2004).

• Organisation