Output details
34 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
Middlesex University
Faster, Higher - multi-screen moving image work
‘Faster, Higher’ was staged at BFI Southbank to coincide with the Beijing Olympics and act as an imaginative precursor to London 2012. The project engaged with two bodies of rarely seen archival footage held at the BFI, one owned by OTAB (Olympic Television Archive Bureau), the other a collection of educational documentary and newsreels donated by the Chinese embassy. This material is interwoven with original footage shot in London near the 2012 site. The work seeks to illuminate relationships between ostensibly distinct historical and cultural events and narratives, through the confluence and continuity of values contiguous to contemporary burgeoning and future moments; to suggest new, oblique narratives of British-Sino relations, within the wider context of China and the Olympics; and to find resonances and commonalities in the visual cultural rhetoric around notions of nation, sport, patriotism and physical endeavour. New footage shot at the London Wushu Academy points to the mixed cultural identifications of young British athletes today, with martial arts serving as a Chinese national, internationally popular, and yet to be recognised Olympics sport. References to colour bars and countdowns allude to my archival points of entry, and signal different ‘universal’ values pertaining to the entwined histories of the Games and the moving image. Faster, Higher picks up on themes of nostalgia and aspiration running through previous projects, such as Golden (2005-07). Further iterations of the project include an artist’s book, visual essay, and a single channel split screen version, called ‘Citius, Altius’ (2012).
The output is presented via portfolio, which should be viewed in order to gain a proper understanding of the research.
