Angus-Hughes Gallery & Sheffield Fringe present: Mainstream 2.1

Angus-Hughes Gallery & Sheffield Fringe present: Mainstream 2.1
With films by, Laure Prouvost, Charlie Tweed, Margaret Salmon, Maria Marshall, Harold Offeh, Yaron Lapid, Fred Lindberg, Erica Scourti.

Friday, 9 December, 6pm – 9pm

Angus-Hughes Gallery, 26 Lower Clapton Road, London, E5 0PD

Live operatic intermissions by The Society of Imaginary Friends.

"Mainstream 2.1" presents a series of artists' films brought together by their varying strategies in the use of actuality as a material object.
Much variation can be sited in how artists and filmmakers approach the use of actuality as a creative, political, and philosophical means for art production. Embedded in these works, dialogues and playful critiques can be found of the documentary form, of documentation, performance and spectatorship.

Perhaps in a way similar to the Hitchcockian principle approach to actors as object material "willing to be utilised and wholly integrated", it could be suggested that here actuality, meaning documentary material itself is the material object used to underpin an artistic authority in the pursuit of a captive audience.
This 'authority' exists not only in bodily presence and performance documentations as in Laure Prouvost, Fred Lindberg or Harold Offeh's work, but also in concept as in Erica Scourti's use of unauthorised archive material, a pastiche on 'becoming', or Margaret Salmon's seemingly covert recording of a couple’s domestic argument.
Providing an altogether more sensory experience for the spectator, these artists provide landscapes of discomfort, which draw in, charm, seduce and repel.

Sheffield Fringe is an artist-led initiative exploring the confluence point between art & documentary practice. It was first staged as a nano festival in June this year to coincide with Sheffield Doc/Fest.
Sheffield Fringe was born out of a desire to create a platform dedicated to an expansive understanding of how we make and view documentaries, incorporating a multitude of suggested strategies of reform.