This new instalment in our on-going series Films in Dialogue proposes an encounter between the work of two highly idiosyncratic, poetic and mysterious artists: Mary Helena Clark (1983, USA) and Stephen Sutcliffe (1968, lives and works in Glasgow).

In conjunction with ‘The Man with the Film Projector’ (23 April – 5 May 2015), Kao Chung-li’s first solo exhibition in the UK, LUX is hosting a screening and panel discussion which aims to explore the history of experimental film in Taiwan as well as Kao’s specific film aesthetics.

The screening will showcase a number of rare films, never previously shown in the UK, including Zhuang Ling’s Life Continued (1966) and Chang Chao-tang’s Face in Motion (1970). Zhuang Ling was one of the core members of Theatre Quarterly, a self-funded avant-garde magazine which introduced European art and film theory to Taiwan, and was published in Taipei by a group of young film aficionados and intellectuals in the 1960s during the martial law era. In a claustrophobic environment that exercised strict thought control, Western modernity represented for these young people an attempt to break free. Chang Chao-tang participated in Theatre’s second experimental film screening with his short film Diary (1967). He later worked at a government-controlled TV station where he made Face in Motion as a result of being bored beyond belief. Kao Chung-li’s early experimental film Home Movies (1988), which inspired Yu Wei-yen’s film Gang of Three Forever (1989), will also be shown at LUX.

In her poem The Breast Anne Sexton ends with the line, “I burn the way money burns,” suggesting the complex and contradictory nature of female desire and its structurally dictated dual role—as lover but also care-giver and mother. These five films selected from LUX and Cinenova collections (1978-1994) not only confront this dual nature of women’s work. Through formal experimentation of both sound and image tracks, they also envision what Susan Stein describes in She Said as the “geometry of creeping lines” that inscribe the social relation of reproduction onto space itself.