Modern Edinburgh Film School: Karen Cunningham

Modern Edinburgh Film School presents a screening of recent and new works in moving image by Glasgow-based artist Karen Cunningham. The event will be accompanied by a reflection on Cunningham’s practice and its intersection of documentary, anthropology and poetry by Dr Angela McClanahan, lecturer in visual culture at Edinburgh College of Art. Films in the programme include Fib, commissioned by Collective and LUX, Mystics After Modernism and Development, which was recently screened at the ICA and Tramway.

‘Her work on questions of time, landscape and its human engagement – into the framings of modernity, ethnography and anthropology are found in the sculpture and moving image work of Karen Cunningham. Cunningham stages in her work the temporal and the travelogue, ‘indexes of time,’ on aspects of landscape – its images, objects, scale and extremes. She discusses and is occupied by its interpretation and its physicality positioned with the viewer... This circumstance, between the artist, her terrain and the sublime, can also be seen in the GoMA exhibition in the drawings of Ilana Halperin and the aerial photography of Patricia Macdonald.’

Part of the exhibition Ripples on the Pond, which has at its core works from the Glasgow Museums’ Collection. It takes as the starting point recent acquisitions from Glasgow Women’s Library's 21 Revolutions series, relating them to other works in the collection and sparking questions about gender, themes and media choice in relation to women’s practice and visibility. The exhibition is a conversation between the works in the collection on paper and moving image with invitations to Modern Edinburgh Film School and LUX Scotland to programme artists’ screenings, within and beyond the gallery space.