Morgan Quaintance
2021His moving image work has been shown and exhibited widely with presentations in 2020 including: Curtas Vila Do Conje, Portugal at which he received the Best Experimental Film award, and CPH:DOX at which he received the New Vision Award, both for the film South (2020); Oberhausen Film Festival, Germany; European Media Art Festival, Germany; Alchemy Film and Arts Festival, Scotland; Images Festival, Toronto; International Film Festival Rotterdam; Punto de Vista Festival in Pamplona, Spain; and Third Horizon Film Festival, Miami. Over the past ten 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 landscape of discourse and debate in the UK.
Quaintance’s films are distributed by LUX, London.
South
Morgan Quaintance
Barbara Van Praag, Lela Kogbari
What kind of power is accessible through the discovery of a voice? Morgan Quaintance interlinks two anti-racist and anti-authoritarian liberation movements in South London and Chicago’s South Side with his own biography to explore what happens when speech is ignored, and the voice fades.
South
札幌からの手紙
Morgan Quaintance
Commissioned for S-AIR’s 2020 residency programme, Letter from Sapporo (2021) is a collage film offering a glimpse of daily life in the Japanese city of Sapporo. The film is the product of approximately 16 participants capturing material with their smartphones. Focusing on moments of stillness, intimacy, labour and humour, disparate material is wedded into a compelling and coherent whole by Quaintance’s subtle editing, original music and vivid sound design.
Letter From Sapporo
Bataaxalu Ndakaaru
Morgan Quaintance
Bataaxalu Ndakaaru (Letter from Dakar) surveys aspects of the vibrant grass roots arts and culture scene in the Senegalese capital of Dakar. Highlighting the difference between the openess and innovation of community run spaces versus the staid professionalism of established galleries and museums, the film offers the first critical look at the much touted Museum of Black Civilisations.
Letter from Dakar
Surviving You, Always
Morgan Quaintance
Timothy Leary, Ram Dass
The proposed metaphysical highs of psychedelic drugs versus the harsh actualities of concrete metropolitan life. These two opposing realities form the backdrop of an adolescent encounter in the city of London, told through still images and written narration.
Surviving You, Always
Early Years
Morgan Quaintance
A portrait of Jamaican-born artistic polymath Barbara Samuels. Featuring an account of her first generation, diasporic experience in Southend and London, and her discovery of hippiedom and the personal freedoms offered by entry into creative life.
Early Years
Missing Time
Morgan Quaintance
What effect does a lapse in memory have on a person? Or on an entire nation? Missing Time investigates the theme of amnesia as experienced by an individual or an entire country. Stories of alien abduction, hypnosis and decolonisation weave together to prod the depths of the lacunas in our minds.
Missing Time
A Human Certainty
Morgan Quaintance
Voices from the past haunt A Human Certainty, whose entangled threads link its multifarious narratives of suffering: a recent break-up; the romantic sweep of mid-century pop music; Weegee’s crime-scene photography; and images taken by the artist’s grandmother, a spirit medium, on her travels in Asia and Africa. Here, Quaintance’s montage becomes a codec for assembling these disparate threads, and for making sense of mortality and loss in all its forms.
A Human Certainty
東京からの手紙
Morgan Quaintance
Letter from Tokyo is a documentary film that looks at art, culture and politics in Tokyo, Japan. Shot over three months during the summer of 2018, and with a particular focus on grass roots arts initiatives, the use of public space, and queer politics, the film provides a snapshot of Japan’s capital in the run up to the 2020 olympics.
Letter from Tokyo
