animate!

Thursday 13 April 2006 19:00

animate! continues its three-part series of special evening screenings during the National Portrait Gallery’s 150th anniversary year, exploring portraiture and the dynamic medium of contemporary animation.

The primary focus of the season is the fascinating relationship between portraiture and place. Examining the implications of interior and exterior spaces, as well as the journeys made between them, Tracing the Contours: Portraiture and Place in Contemporary Animation draws from animate!’s impressive catalogue of commissions to illuminate this intriguing aspect of visual culture.

In addition, each evening the writer and Time Out film critic Gareth Evans investigates with cross-platform commentators the unique way in which animation, the manipulated moving image, can amplify notions of portraiture.

Route Masters: Portraits in Transition

This second evening of the three-part series explores how animation uses the moving image to create seductive and sometimes disturbing portraits of people and communities in flux, where both identities and landscape are in the process of change.

Iain Sinclair, poet, filmmaker and one of Britain’s most respected authors (and compulsive walker!), is perhaps best known for his books of psychogeographic exploration Lights out for the Territory and London Orbital. In fact most of his prolific work, including the seminal hour-long film The Falconer with Chris Petit, has pursued this same visionary intuition of the complex inter-relationships and journeys linking people, place, politics, history and landscapes. Tonight he extends his insights into contemporary animation that teases out the tensions between place and motion:

Dad’s Dead by Chris Shepherd, Feeling My Way by Jonathan Hodgson, Flight by Dryden Goodwin, Go West Young Man by Keith Piper, Miles from Anywhere by Gary Carpenter, The Nuclear Train by Daniel Saul and Sunset Strip by Kayla Parker.

The final evening in the animate! series at the National Portrait Gallery on 11 May will be Private Eyes: Portraits Inside with Sukhdev Sandhu, Critic of the Year, British Press Awards 2005.

Ondaatje Wing Theatre
National Portrait Gallery
St Martin’s Place
Trafalgar Square
London WC2H 0HE
nearest tube: Leicester Square or Charing Cross
admission: £5 / £3 concessions

Thursday 13 April 2006 19:00 More details › Map ›

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