Events & Exhibitions
ETERNAL RETURN
08 November 2024 – 06 April 2025
Leeds Art Gallery
“What closure might you bring, what fissure in this untimely loop?”
Stuart Croft, script for Remetior
Eternal Return is a major exhibition of artist film works by Leeds-born Stuart Croft, the first since his untimely death in 2015. Visitors to the gallery are invited to journey through a sequence of immersive spaces, each containing an infinitely looping narrative film with no distinct beginning, middle or end. The films transport us from the bedroom a gothic mansion where we eavesdrop on a macabre fable, to the passenger seat of a car on an endless road trip, and from the abandoned film-set of a 1950’s musical, to the claustrophobic vault of a spacecraft flying at blinding speed.
Stuart Croft’s films imaginatively collapse the boundaries between art and cinema, incorporating the gestures, images and production values of Hollywood film into the space of the gallery. Over twenty years and a body of work comprising 17 films, he continually returned to themes of power, recurrence, entrapment and desire. Croft’s films confound and subvert our ingrained expectations of conventional cinema genres such as the road trip movie, the shaggy dog story, film noir and MGM musicals.
Four of Croft’s major film works (Stag Without a Heart, Drive In, Remetior, and Comma 39) will be shown at Leeds Art Gallery, with others screened as part of Leeds International Film Festival’s spotlight on the artist (from 1-17 November). The exhibition includes the world premiere of Remetior, the last film the artist produced with sound design finished posthumously by his friends and collaborators.
The exhibition is presented by Leeds Art Gallery in partnership with Stuart Croft Foundation and Leeds International Film Festival.
For more information, visit the Leeds Art Gallery website.
Introducing Stuart Croft
Friday 8 November
Leeds Art Gallery
A special event introducing the work of Stuart Croft (1970-2015), organised to coincide with the Leeds International Film Festival (LIFF) and on the opening day of the exhibition Stuart Croft: Eternal Return at Leeds Art Gallery. The event featured a talk from friend and peer of Stuart’s, Emma Bennett, which included clips from Croft’s earlier films and a screening of Adam Robert’s short film Lamentation: In the Stuart Croft Archive. The event took place in the Henry Moore Lecture Theatre at Leeds Art Gallery and started with a short presentation from Alex King, Programme Manager at LIFF, introduced by Gary Thomas, co-chair of the Stuart Croft Foundation.
Emma Bennett is a Welsh artist, based in London, UK. Emma met Stuart on the MA programme at Chelsea College of Art and Design (1997-98) and worked on several of his films. She is a founding trustee and co-chair of the Stuart Croft Foundation. Emma is also the Editor of ‘Stuart Croft Returns’, the first monograph to focus on the artist, which was published by The Everyday Press in April 2024.
Spotlight on Stuart Croft
01 – 17 November 2024
Leeds International Film Festival
Stuart Croft (1970-2015), a talented artist-filmmaker from Leeds, imaginatively collapsed the boundaries between the art gallery and cinema. His journey took him from Lawnswood School in Leeds to exhibitions in New York, Venice, and Beijing. Croft’s work subverts genre conventions and narrative expectations in a playful and thought-provoking way, drawing influences from groundbreaking art films to classic Hollywood cinema.
In partnership with Leeds Art Gallery and The Stuart Croft Foundation, LIFF will present a special programme of films that inspired Stuart’s unique vision, paired with three of his own looping moving image works Century City, The Death Waltz and Hit. This season is designed to complement the immersive exhibition Stuart Croft: Eternal Return at Leeds Art Gallery (8 November 2024 – 6 April 2025).
LIFF 2024 will run from 1st to 17th November 2024 at various venues across the city.
For more information, visit the Leeds International Film Festival website.
QUESTIONS
March – June 2021
ONLINE
In 2021, the Stuart Croft Foundation hosted a series of online events called ‘Questions’, where we invited artists, curators, researchers and writers working with artists’ moving image to discuss the process of thinking and making behind their projects.
‘The Bang Straws’ with Michelle Williams Gamaker
In partnership with Jupiter Woods
19th March 2021
Speakers: Michelle Williams, Carolina Ongaro, Katie Simpson, Annie Jael Kwan, Steven Eastwood.
For the first in a series, we partnered with Jupiter Woods and welcomed artist Michelle Williams Gamaker to talk about her film The Bang Straws, which in 2020 was awarded the SCF Moving Image Award from the Stuart Croft Foundation and a ‘Herstories & Feminisms’ research and development grant from Jupiter Woods. Michelle talked with Carolina Ongaro and Katie Simpson from Jupiter Woods about their collaboration and the research and production process, discussing the importance of supporting artistic research and experimenting with ways of making this public. She then spoke with curator and researcher Annie Jael Kwan, exploring the film’s relationship with traditional Chinese art forms and tropes, the legacy of colonial filmmaking and cinematic practice, and how fictional activism and intercultural solidarity might operate as a methodology/lens for artists and organisers.
‘A=A’
In partnership with with Alchemy Film & Arts
29th April 2021
Speakers: Panteha Abareshi, Rebecca Jane Arthur, Jennifer Martin, Hogan Seidel, Michael Pattison, Steven Eastwood.
We partnered with Alchemy Film & Arts to host a discussion event examining questions of repetition, duration and the loop in artists’ moving image. Featuring talks by three artists – Panteha Abareshi, Rebecca Jane Arthur, Jennifer Martin (recipient of the 2018 SCF Education Award) and Hogan Seidel – the event marked a year since the first, and what was wrongly assumed to be the only, online edition of Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival.
‘LAMENTATION: ON ABSENCE, THE ARCHIVE AND WHAT COMES AFTER’
In partnership with BIMI
FRIDAY 4TH JUNE 2021
Speakers: Adam Roberts, Gareth Evans
We partnered with Birkbeck Institute of Moving Image (BIMI) to host a live online conversation between writer, filmmaker and curator Adam Roberts and curator/writer Gareth Evans to discuss cultural value and its legacies in the face of ecological collapse, drawing from Adam’s research and his new book ‘Lamentation. In the Stuart Croft Archive’ which was supported by the 2018 Stuart Croft Foundation Research Award. The event included a BIMI Screening Room presentation of Stuart Croft’s films ‘The Stag Without a Heart’ (2010) and ‘Drive In (2007)’, shared for 48 hours before the event.
Tourism
March 28, 2021-May 24, 2021
Kunsthaus Glarus and Stadtgalerie Bern
Stuart Croft’s film Drive In (2007) was screened as part of a two part group exhibition curated by Luca Beeler, Richard Sides and Judith Welte. The show featured artists Marie Angeletti, Stuart Croft, Tony Hill, Judith Hopf, Morag Keil, Nina Könnemann, Miriam Laura Leonardi, Jordan Lord, Asta Lynge, Stuart Middleton, Phung-Tien Phan, Josiane M.H. Pozi, Steve Reinke, Dani ReStack, Richard Sides, Terre Thaemlitz.
For more information, visit the Kunsthaus Glarus website.
‘A Restless Rendition’
September 5 – October 31, 2020
Galerie Drei
Stuart Croft’s film Drive In (2007) was screened as part of a group exhibition curated by Kathrin Bentele. The show featured artists Stuart Croft, Loretta Fahrenholz, Yuki Kimura, Angharad Williams.
For more information, visit the Galerie Drei website.
‘Artists, Fiction and Cinema: Staging the Stuart Croft Archive’
19th April 2018
BFI Southbank
Speakers: Will Fowler, Emma Bennett, Anna Lucas and Harriet Fleuriot
In April 2018, the BFI hosted ‘Artists, Fiction and Cinema: Staging the Stuart Croft Archive’, a special re-presentation of Stuart Croft’s 2014 Sotheby’s lecture alongside the first UK screening of his 2010 film, ‘The Stag Without a Heart’. The event, which was developed in partnership with the foundation, revisited Stuart’s ideas and reflected on how his archive might be activated in the present day.