17th Nov 2011 - 3rd Dec 2011
Sallis Benney Theatre
Andrew and Eden Kötting
South Gallery, FREE ENTRY / Weekdays 10.00am – 8.00pm / Saturday 10.00am – 5.00pm / CLOSED on Sunday/s.
A portrait of a tumbledown Pyrenean farmhouse through the eyes and ears of a family that have lived there on and off for the last 22 years. Film, paintings, drawings, texts and ephemera explore themes of Still-Life, isolation and the animistic nature of the great outdoors.
At the heart of the exhibition is Andrew Kötting’s new film, a home movie that builds into a moving, warm and intimate place and person portrait. Focusing on Andrew and Leila’s daughter Eden who featured in Kötting’s GALLIVANT (1996) touring the coastline of the UK with her father and ‘Big Granny’, we first see the family in France with Eden just a baby. As the seasons ebb and flow around her Eden is shown painting still lifes and singing along to the radio. (enjoying her gloriously idiosyncratic existence). With music from Scanner and a whole plethora of cut-ups and voices from the film-maker’s sound archive, THIS OUR STILL LIFE exudes an evocative charge of melancholia and nostalgia.
“Kötting understands instinctively that, in these unsettling and transformative times, the local in both heart and hearth needs to be radically re-imagined as the prime locus of our needs and search for belonging.” Gareth Evans.
‘The genius of Andrew Kötting is to marry Stan Brakhage and Benny Hill: heart-rending visionary intensity with lurching human comedy, funny voices, speeding physicality. An authentic poem to place, in and of wild nature. Panoramic and intimate. And wholly absorbing.” Iain Sinclair.
