Moving Images Within Precarious Structures – Episode 2: Class Matters

The second episode of a year-long programme Moving Images Within Precarious Structures is curated by Deborah Jackson with contributors Hayley Dawson and Michelle Hannah. This screening event explores themes of social class and its theoretical, practical and ideological implications that intersect with, for example, education, migration, gender, race, ethnicity, and inclusionary / exclusionary politics.

Feminist filmmaker Vivienne Dick is best known as a pivotal figure of the 1970’s New York No Wave film movement that brought avant-garde experimentation into bars and clubs alongside punk bands and performance. With The Irreducible Difference of the Other (2013) she focuses on themes of relatedness and interconnection. By disrupting documentary film conventions she invites us to grasp at a sense of ‘difference’ or ‘otherness’ as a relationship, rather than an opposition or antagonism.

In The Expulsion (2016) Larry Achiampong highlights the rich interior world of an unnamed migrant with references to themes of race, class and gender. Drawing from his Ghanian roots and reflecting on the traumas of the African diasporas this work forces an imagined viewer to look at what has been made unseen. He guides us through a shadow world of ‘invisible’ workers, weaving testimonies and daydreams with the monotonous rhythms of physical labour and the weight of frustrating consumerist aspirations in London’s West End.

Tory Stories – An Ugly Steak of Violence (1984) is one of three short pieces in the collection Tory Stories, the other two being The Revival and Back After the Break. With this work Peter Savage uses material from an interview with Margaret Thatcher (the Conservative [Tory] Party Leader and Prime Minister of the UK from 1979-1990). Thatcher’s assault on the working class devastated communities leaving them ravaged by unemployment, poverty and all the social problems that accompany them, for which they would later be blamed. This work demonstrates how politicians and the media shape what we understand, to reinforce particular viewpoints, such as Thatcher’s demonisation of the working class.

The screening will be accompanied by a conversation between Deborah Jackson, Hayley Dawson and Michelle Hannah and the audience.

Delivered in partnership with Fine Art Research (School of Fine Art) at the Glasgow School of Art (GSA), and LUX Scotland, Moving Images Within Precarious Structures is a year-long programme of episodes that start from the proposition that precarity is a condition of artist moving image practice. Through screenings, talks, workshops, and publishing, Moving Images Within Precarious Structures examines the ways precarity structures the aesthetics and politics of artist moving image, and how new ways of making, materialising and thinking the moving image can work in opposition to the conditions, effects and affects of precarity.

Host or Publisher LUX Scotland