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Dark is the Night - Solo exhibition

‘Dark is the Night’ takes the form of three films which were co-commissioned by ArtSway, Hampshire and The Photographers’ Gallery, London, through a joint application to Arts Council England. The films titled ‘Dark is the Night’, ‘Nasty Piece of Stuff’ and ‘The Dandy Doctrine (A Delightful Illusion)’ feature residents of Soho in London: Lucy Browne, a transsexual sex-worker, Sebastian Horsley, a self-styled Dandy and Alan Wakeman, founding member of Gay Liberation Front.

The production of these films question the documentary trope of the talking head by asking how non-fiction narratives function as contemporary artworks. Exploring how experimental filmmaking can be combined with recorded interviews to create portrait-based artworks, Baseman constructs narratives of personal and social identity.

A publication accompanied the exhibitions featuring texts by Gemma Seltzer and David Barrett, with an afterword by Camilla Brown and Peter Bonnell.

The film ‘Nasty Piece of Stuff’ was exhibited at ArtSway's New Forest Pavilion, 53rd International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia (2009), the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead (2010), Aberdeen Art Gallery (2011) and the Bluecoat, Liverpool (2013). It was selected for the San Francisco International Short Film Festival and the Los Angeles Animation Festival where it won Best Film in the Dangerous Experiments Category in 2010. Another film in the exhibition, ‘The Dandy Doctrine (A Delightful Illusion)’ was selected for the London Short Film Festival (2011) and the Melbourne Underground Film Festival (2010), where it won Best International Short Film.

The exhibition was listed in ‘The best art shows to see this week’ in The Guardian (2009) and reviewed in Blueprint Magazine (2009) and MAP Magazine (2009).