Jerwood Arts

Guy Oliver & Reman Sadani
Jerwood/FVU Awards 2020: Hindsight
October 29–December 13, 2020

www.jerwoodfvuawards.com
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The Jerwood/FVU Awards online exhibition premieres Guy Oliver's You Know Nothing of My Work and Reman Sadani's Walkout 1. Both films are available to watch in full alongside newly commissioned texts by Adnan Madani and Louise Ashcroft, interviews with the artists, online events, and image galleries, to enable you to fully explore the key critical themes within the works. 

Guy Oliver’s film, You Know Nothing of My Work, is a multi-chapter rumination on the cultural dilemma of the disgraced popular icon, the tension between a problematic past and a more enlightened present, and the role of the male voice in a post-Me Too era. The work develops Oliver’s established practice of mixing pop culture references with self-deprecating character performances and complex social issues. Idiosyncratic in style and form, this moving-image work takes the unexpected form of a musical to unpick the notion of celebrity, toxic masculinity, and moral ambiguity. Oliver adopts various male archetypes as he probes what to do with the work of cultural icons such as Michael Jackson, Woody Allen, Kevin Spacey, and Bill Cosby. By exploring this difficult subject through the medium of song and the device of rhyming couplets, Oliver blurs the comic and the tragic, questions his own stance on these issues, and allows the awkwardness of his position as a male artist to spill onto the screen. 

“Guy Oliver does in 30 minutes what it has taken others many hours and thousands of words to do, which is to explore ideas around bad behaviour and art and what is known popularly as 'cancel culture.' Nimble, disarming and funny, his musical film does everything art is supposed to do; it provokes; it charms; it makes you see the world anew.” –Rachel Cooke, Writer and Journalist at the Observer, New Statesman. Listen to her interview with Guy Oliver, here. 

Reman Sadani’s Walkout 1, reflects how a preoccupation with the past could be considered a privilege when faced with the challenges of the present. Walkout 1 is set in a city that has been shrouded in dust, setting the film in a post-crisis, desert-like cityscape. The poetic film explores the flaws of a society’s single viewpoint, in particular how a dominant ideology can be forced upon a younger generation. In order to lift the cloud of dust, four young characters are instructed by an elder who rigidly adheres to a vision, leading to doubts and questions from her followers. The nature of crisis shows that it is often impossible to "look back" and reflect because of a present, urgent need for survival. The film draws on Sadani’s own experiences of growing up in Arab countries and later moving to the UK. Having recently graduated from her BA at the Slade School of Fine Art, Sadani is the youngest ever awardee of the Jerwood/FVU Awards.

Watch Reman Sadani in conversation with curator, cultural strategist and Deputy Director of Delfina Foundation, Salma Tuqan, here. 

Visit the Jerwood/FVU Awards 2020: Hindsight online exhibition, here. 

DIY Screening: Host a Do-It-Yourself film screening at home of the Jerwood/FVU Awards films, December 13, 2020. Book now!

Responding to the theme of Hindsight, artists Guy Oliver and Reman Sadani Jerwood/FVU Awards commissions explore the power of reflection through film-making, how ideas shift through time and generations, and the complex nature of hindsight itself.

The Jerwood/FVU Awards, now in its seventh edition is the largest moving-image commissioning platform for UK-based, early-career artists. Following a nationwide call for applications which received over 220 proposals, each artist was awarded GBP 25,000 to develop significant new moving-image works with Film and Video Umbrella and Jerwood Arts. Past awardees include Imran Perretta, Lawrence Lek, Marianna Simnett, Ed Atkins and Kate Cooper.

The selection panel for the 2020 Jerwood/FVU Awards included Irene Aristizábal, Head of Curatorial and Public Practice, BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art and Co-curator British Art Show 9 (2020) and Shezad Dawood, artist.