Fellow

Efforts of Nature V

is the fifth iteration of an expanded screening programme arranged by Morgan Quaintance, that both includes and extends from his film of the same name. This version of the combined programme, featuring moving image and spoken word work by Marthe Peters, Jerry Tartaglia, Marlon Riggs, Xiaolu Wang, Pedro Pietri and Anne Charlotte Robinson, considers the human body as both grounded locus for affects, pleasures and illnesses; and as a vessel through which carnal realities lead to transcendental experience. Together these works explore what encases the body, what sets the mind free, and how these two conditions may not be as separate as we think.

BIO
Morgan Quaintance

His practice remains open and responsive to contemporary experience and so largely eschews the rehearsal of set themes. However, interests in the human condition, the cultic milieu, counterculture, ethnography, Afro-Caribbean, East Asian and British histories, and the built environment are all mainstays. His moving image work has been shown and exhibited widely at festivals and institutions including: MOMA, New York; Mcevoy Foundaton for the Arts, San Francisco; Konsthall C, Sweden; David Dale, Glasgow; European Media Art Festival, Germany; Alchemy Film and Arts Festival, Scotland; Images Festival, Toronto; International Film Festival Rotterdam; and Third Horizon Film Festival, Miami.

He is a 2024 MacDowell Fellow. He was the 2023 IFFR Short Film Nominee for the European Film Awards; the recipient of the 2022 ARTE Award at Kurzfilm Festival Hamburg; in 2021, the Best Documentary Short Film Award at Tacoma Film Festival, USA; the Explora Award at Curtocircuito International Film Festival, Santiago de Compostela; the UK Short Film Award at Open City Documentary Film Festival, London, the Jean Vigo Prize for Best Director at Punto de Vista, Spain, and the Best Experimental Film Award at Curtas Vila do Conde, Portugal; in 2020, the New Vision Award at CPH:DOX, Denmark and the Best Experimental Film award at Curtas Vila Do Conde, Portugal .

Over the past fourteen years, his critically incisive writings on contemporary art, aesthetics and their socio-political contexts have featured in publications including Art Monthly, the Wire, and the Guardian, and helped shape the new landscape of discourse and debate in the UK. A key reference here is his 2017 text The New Conservatism: Complicity and the UK Art World’s Performance of Progression, available here. ‘汾阳的喧嚣: Ironic Resonance, Anti-sound Design and Radical Cacophony in Jia Zhangke’s 小 Xiao 武 Wu’ is his first book.

From 2012 – 2023 he was the producer and presenter of Studio Visit, an interview-based, broadcast radio programme for London’s Resonance 104.4FM. The post-broadcast archive of over 100 interviews can be found here, and includes in depth conversations with Carolee Schneemann, Kevin Jerome Everson, Jimmie Durham, Susan Hiller, Jean Fisher, Andrea Fraser, Kathleen Daniel and Billy Woodberry.

Quaintance’s films are distributed by LUX, London.