JORDAN BASEMAN makes experimental portraiture, “I think of it as creative non-fiction” – how we visually and conceptually represent our lives and our relationship to the world around us. E is a psychedelic road journey, a portrait of Essex Road at night with multiple exposure visuals that collide, overlap, compliment and disturb one another.
HELEN BENIGSON is a video artist who creates highly visceral and sensual environments that reference pop culture, contemporary game playing and animation. Using fast paced text, Essex Road Hen Party celebrates this female ritual: libidinous, carnivalesque undercurrents pulsate within the night city.
SEBASTIAN BUERKNER experiments with the medium of animation, combining cutting-edge digital technology with layered, abstract imagery. He uses multiple layers and fragmented imagery that suggest half-forgotten memories. Eaves Apart is a kinetic journey on the 38 night-bus; a brilliantly coloured collage of overheard conversations, transitory sights, crowds, rain-lashed windows.
The New York based American film-maker JEM COHEN is known for his observational portraits of urban landscapes and the tempos and textures of cities. His films are often predicated on the sense of an outsider wandering through a city. unseen unsaid is his interpretation of Essex Road – moments of exchange and encounter; sights of
unexpected beauty; vignettes that express the complexity of how people live and move through the city.
RUTH MACLENNAN navigates a territory between fiction and documentary, using her own encounters and experiences of a place as a starting point to explore overlooked moments and fragments of stories that reveal unresolved conflicts. Zigni focuses an Eritrean restaurant on Essex Road; an edge-world where a translucent veil separates the passers-by in the street from the private celebration unfolding inside the intimate theatre of the restaurant.
Often a cross between sociological record and staged event, MELANIE MANCHOT's video work records particular gestures and forms of movement or activities that become the marker of a group or community. For Lower Street Manchot asked local shopkeepers to stand outside their businesses; the film is a long, eerily elegiac tracking shot – a group portrait of Essex Road in 2015.
URIEL ORLOW makes multi-media installations and contemplative video works that investigate the roles that language, image and memory play in structuring private and collective experience. In Orlow’s film, Letters from Edna, performance artists Adam Christenesen and Marcia Farquar conjure up Joe Orton’s letter-writing, fictional alter-ego Edna Welthorpe. Much of the film was shot outside Joe Orton and Kenneth Halliwell’s former home in Islington.
Much loved for their wit, formal ingenuity and use of storytelling and often rooted in everyday life, JOHN SMITH's meticulously crafted films re-work and transform reality, playfully exploring and exposing the language of cinema. Fresh Fruit Venerable revolves around the deliberate misuse of Word Lens Translator app for smart phones – mistranslations that offer a comic, irreverent and absurd interpretation of shop signs and notices on Essex Road.