A Century of Artists' Film in Britain

This exhibition was the outcome of three years of dialogue with senior curators at the Tate around the question of how the history of artists’ moving-image art might best be represented alongside paintings and sculptures in the gallery-space. At its opening, Tate Britain director Stephen Deuchars recognised the project as the first, and long overdue presentation of this history by the Gallery. As sole curator, I selected the 170 works and 130 artists included in the show, and designed the four day-long sequences of thematic and historic ‘programmes’, which ran in Gallery 26 without repeats, from gallery-opening till close, changing entirely at three-month intervals. This innovative approach was designed to allow for both the unplanned ‘walk-through’ encounter of many gallery visitors, and the ‘planned’ visit of those who had found the web-catalogue (which gave exact start-times for every work shown). To achieve this combination of ‘seamless’ delivery with contextual ‘punctuation’, all works were transferred to hard-drive, and were introduced by mini-interviews with the artists, and/or explanatory texts, created through a partnership with llluminations Television