Artist
Grace Schwindt presents her film
Only a Free Individual Can Create a Free Society (2014) in which she revisits discussions witnessed during a childhood spent among radical leftwing individuals in Frankfurt. An interview with a former activist who participated in the student movement in Germany in the 1960s and 70s appears in various forms throughout the film. Schwindt questions how freedom was and is understood, who has access to it, and what political and social structures a free society needs. Dancers inhabiting a series of sets recite the interview while performing a precise choreography between stillness and movement.
After the screening, the artist will be in conversation with curator
Matthew Higgs about the film and her work more generally.
Only a Free Individual Can Create a Free Society was commissioned by FLAMIN Productions through Film London Artists’ Moving Image Network; Eastside Projects, Birmingham; The Showroom, London; Badischer Kunstverein; Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver; Site Gallery, Sheffield; Tramway, Glasgow; ICIA, University of Bath; and Zeno X Gallery, Antwerp. Supported by Arts Council England, Hessian Film Fund, and the Jerwood Charitable Foundation.
Grace Schwindt (born 1979, Germany) is a London-based artist working with film, live performance, and sculpture. Her theatrical sets for film works use minimal architectural elements and props to mark a location, in which she places bodies including her own. Using a tightly scripted choreography in which every move relates to institutionalised systems, she investigates how social relations and understandings about oneself are formed, often through acts of exclusion and destruction. Schwindt’s interviews with individuals often serve as a starting point for fictionalised dialogues delivered by performers. Recent solo presentations include South London Gallery, Institute of Contemporary Arts, and Whitechapel Gallery, London; Collective Gallery, Edinburgh; Art Unlimited at Art Basel; the Istanbul Biennial; and White Columns, New York. Schwindt was shortlisted for the 2013 Jarman Film Award.
Born in the UK,
Matthew Higgs trained and worked as an artist before also becoming known for his independent publishing and curatorial projects that raised the profile of emerging artists through the 1990s. In 2001 he relocated to the US, to San Francisco, where he became curator of the Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts at the California College of the Arts and later the co-chair of the college’s MFA program. He now lives and works in New York where he is director of the city's oldest alternative non-profit art space White Columns.
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