Projects matching: Katie Davies

Synopsis

Captured just before and during the Coronavirus outbreak and in the lead up to Brexit, DIVIDED BY LAW bears witness to binational families and couples trying to cope with the UK’s hostile immigration environment. From multiple locations across the world, we hear personal accounts of how the interviewees navigate their way through the UK family immigration regulations, encountering prolonged periods of separation from their partners and families with distressing consequences.

Synopsis

THE SEPARATION SYSTEM (2017/18) is a collaborative commission facilitated by FACT’s Veterans in Practice programme, produced by veterans through workshops at HMP Liverpool and HMP Altcourse with artist Katie Davies. Taking the form of both a single channel cinematic film and a two-screen immersive installation, the piece explores the distinct, yet interconnected, spaces of the military, custody and ‘civilian’ life. Exploring these spaces and the experiences within them through the notion of work, an everyday activity that unites these worlds and is familiar to us all, the film communicates what we, as a civilian audience, do not understand about the unique set of relations, actions and responsibilities held by the individuals within these spaces.

Synopsis

SLEEPING IN PUBLIC is a new collaborative moving image commission, collaborating with writer Ellen Wilkinson for Bristol Museum and Art Gallery.
Captured at night in Bristol, the video work shows details of empty spaces: functional but overlooked parts of the city that in daylight would be populated by people working. In these dark images people are distantly present: a blurry figure passes behind a semi-opaque loading bay door; chairs wait for sitters to return; discarded paper cups are lit by the blue flashes of an emergency siren; someone wearing a high visibility jacket pauses in the centre of a car park.
The measured – perhaps weary – voice of the European narrator describes workers in a warehouse of artificial plants and flowers. Without a defined beginning and end, this looping video reflects the repetitive nature of the daily work that many of us do, depicting workplace hierarchies and the subtle ways in which people's behaviour is controlled.

Synopsis

The Lawes of the Marches documents the ancient border tradition of the Common Ridings all along the border of England and Scotland. These ridings are about marking and commemorating the past with as much relevance today as when they began in 1500.

Synopsis

THE SEPARATION LINE exposes a British border shared by hundreds of civilians and members of the Armed Forces. Between 2007 and 2011 the small English market town of Wootton Bassett became the site for the British repatriation ceremonies and during an eighteen-month period between February 2010 and August 2011 all the repatriation ceremonies that passed through the town from 2010 to 2011, including the concluding ceremony in August 2011 were filmed. Filming alternative aspects and perspectives to that of documentaries and regular media coverage, the work shares an experience of the repatriations that has not been presented nationally or internationally.

Synopsis

Filmed at the Demilitarized Zone on the border between North and South Korea, the work 38TH PARALLEL seeks to portray the particular reality of this contested site. It is a reality marked by an eerie sense of latency. Constantly alert, constantly inert, North and South face each other in a stalemate situation sealed by a cease-fire agreement 55 years ago. In her video, Davies operates in this void.

Working with the United Nations Armistice Commission and the United States Armed Forces in Korea, she shows how political reality manifests itself here, beyond representation, in the ways how space is structured and time is regimented in this militarized environment. Facing each other across the turnpike, for instance, border guards of both sides execute the silent ceremonies of authority proscribed by their military protocol. It’s choreography of empty gestures enacted on the stage of a deserted strip of land and bleak interrogation rooms.

Davies then shows the local epicentre of conflict of global proportions to be a non-place where power manifests itself in ghostly acts of decorum performed in suspended time.

Synopsis

Filmed in Santa Monica, Los Angeles, LOOKING FOR ABRAHAM is a four-minute excerpt from a stand up routine captured during happy hour in a European hostel. The comic cultivates a relationship between the audience and himself that unnervingly veers between public performance and private confession. In an environment where this self-effacing routine could be his genuine act, the audience sits uncomfortably as they try to draw the line between fiction and reality.

LOOKING FOR ABRAHAM was selected for New Contemporaries 2005