British Art Show 8
I Still Believe in Miracles
22nd July - 23rd October 2016
Installation views from I still believe in miracles, Inverleith House, Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh.
Thomas Houseago, Untitled Drawing for Paul, 2011; Louise Bourgeois, Topiary, 2005 (Courtesy of The Easton Foundation / Louise Bourgeois Studio).
Juergen Teller, ‘Cerith, Suffolk’, 2011 (Courtesy Studio Juergen Teller); Dan Colen, ‘Blowin in the wind’, 2013 (Courtesy of the artist, Gagosian Gallery).
The Art of Education: John Hope & John Hutton Balfour (Courtesy the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh Archive).
The Art of Education: John Hope & John Hutton Balfour (Courtesy the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh Archive).
The Coat - Corin Sworn & Tony Romano
30th September 2016
'The Coat' (2016, HD video, 58 mins) loosely adapts Aristophanes' 'The Birds' from 414 BC Athens to a few hot days in contemporary Calabria. The film follows two characters, a young man and his daughter, who have arrived from Albania looking for a better life. They are searching for a swimming coach who fled the collapse of Communism in the 1990s, but instead they find an Arbëresh community, descendants of an earlier Albanian exodus in 1450.
Along the way the pair intercept two actors touring the rural south in an attempt to resuscitate the long dead street hero Punchinella. The past is unruly though and histories, invoked, fold quickly back in on themselves and diffuse through the Calabrian landscape.
A Canadian relative looking for his 'roots' joins the actors but like the others, naive to the terrain that surrounds them, he only charts a cartography of his own desire. Meanwhile the birds fly overhead taunting everyones imprudence.
'The Coat' was commissioned by the Toronto International Film Festival in 2015. It was written with a cast of actors and non-actors in response to interviews with migrants in Canada and Italy.
After the screening, Corin Sworn was joined by Peter Taylor, Festival Director Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival for a discussion on the film and the artist's work.