Site Festival dates: 1st-31st May 2012
The Site Festival is a contemporary arts festival, now in its 16th year, which brings a full and dynamic programme of visual arts, performance, music, screenings, open studios, artist talks and workshops to the Stroud Valleys for the whole month of May. SVA and Stroud Arts Festival are pleased to be working in partnership again this year.
Opening Event
Darren Almond
Sometimes Still
May 5th-10th
Brunel Goods Shed, Stroud,
Gloucestershire GL5 3AP
Darren Almond Sometimes Still
5th-10th May
Saturday 10am-3pm, Sunday-Wednesday 11am-7pm,
Thursday 11am-9pm
Brunel Goods Shed, Stroud GL5 3AP
SVA, the Site Festival host organisation, is pleased to announce that the opening exhibition will be Sometimes Still by Darren Almond, supported by Darbyshire and White Cube.
Sometimes Still is an imposing six-screen high-definition video Almond filmed on Mt. Hiei near Kyoto, Japan, over several years. This will be its first showing in the UK. In the film Almond and his camera accompany a Tendai novitiate monk during a nightly marathon, part of the novitiate's broader engagement with the Buddhist process of Kaihōgyō; a seven year feat of physical and mental endurance by which these monks attempt to reach a state of enlightenment. Considered to be a "limit-experience", the ritual is intended to promote a concentrated, intense experience of body and time, testing the human limits of endurance.
The 25 minute film follows the monk leaving the temple at night, crossing and passing underneath roads and finally returning to the temple at dawn. The camera gradually loses the protagonist from view. This journey through the undergrowth is filmed in such a way as to suggest that it is the viewer who is running. The resonant sound of the monk's heartbeat intensifies the viewer's engagement with the unfolding visual narrative. Although at times four additional screens also show the same scene as the central screen, more often they appear to show what might be seen by the monk as he travels. Frequent appearances of negative images create a strange, wanly lit and immeasurable spatial depth. The film ends with 'Marathon Monk' having endured and completed his nocturnal trials, blessing the city of Kyoto, deep in the valley swathed in the dawn mist.
Darren Almond, one of the most significant British artists of the past decade, was a YBA Sensation artist and Turner Prize nominee in 2005. Darren Almond's diverse work, incorporating film, installation, sculpture and photography, deals with evocative meditations on time and duration as well as the themes of personal and historical memory. Darren Almond is represented by White Cube.
In order to view Darren Almond's 'Sometimes Still' installation visit the below address from the exhibition at Matthew Marks Gallery, New York (May 8 -July 9, 2010)
http://gallery.me.com/thestudio110#100006
Further text and images available
Website links
http://whitecube.com/artists/darren_almond/
www.darbyshire.uk.com
For full press listings of all Site 2012 Festival exhibitions, performance, music, open studios and events will be available soon.
Festival programmes and Open Studio Directories will be freely available.
For further press information contact press@sva.org.uk
