James Richards is an artist who lives and works in Berlin and London. Known for his provocative and visually seductive moving-image works that collage together a wide range of source material – such as intimate home movies, archival foot- age, television signals and rich musical soundtracks – James Richards’s work addresses the relentless flow of imagery that has come to define the 21st century, carving out a space where personal politics and digital materiality might meet. Con- current with filmmaking, Richards has presented numerous exhibition projects informed through archival research as well as through ongoing collaborative exchanges with other artists.Selected exhibitions include: Alms for the Birds, Castello Di Rivoli, Turin (2020); SPEED 2, Malmö Konsthall w/ Leslie Thornton (2019); SPEED, Künstlerhaus Stuttgart w/ Leslie Thornton (2018); Ache, Cabinet, London (2019); Slight Ache, Chapter Arts Centre, Cardiff (2019 Selected group exhibitions include: The Botanical Mind, Camden Arts Centre (2020); Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2017); Less Than Zero, Walker Arts Center, Minneapolis (2016); Cut to Swipe, MoMA, New York (2014); Frozen Lakes, Artists Space, New York (2013); and The Encyclopedic Palace, 55th International Art Exhibition La Biennale de Venezia, Venice (2013).In 2017 Richards represented Wales at the 57th Venice Bien- nale, and he was shortlisted for the 2014 Turner prize.
Event When We Were Monsters James Richards artist talk and screening Wednesday 21st September 10.00-11:45 Cinema is always Frankenstein; a composite being. Indeed, what is more monstrous than the cut itself? For Richards the filmic severing of an image from its origin reveals it, making it available for inspection. James Richards’ screening and artist talk includes When We were Monsters a film made in collabo- ration with Steve Rinke which relishes deviations and per- versions that appear on closer inspection or when searching for stable meanings. Of what happens when we lean into our desires and find the porous line between inside and outside, self and other, the body and the world.Working intermittently together since 2008, the filmmakers have been exchanging material across the Atlantic to their re- spective studios in Chicago and Berlin. Drawing upon a loose, shared archive of found and self-shot footage, music edits and found texts culled from essays and poetry, these dismembered fragments slowly cohere across time zones as the two assemble new work. The starting point for ‘When We Were Monsters’ was a video tape of projection footage made by the artist Gretchen Bender. Originally edited as a series of video projec- tions for Bill T Jones’s dance piece Still/Here, for New York’s Whitney Museum in 1994, Bender drew upon a large cache of forensic images given to her by a plastic surgeon. Clinical im- ages of infections, deformities and morbid injuries are turned by Bender into an abject flicker-film.