Event
Labour in a Single Shot | Video making workshop
Saturday 11 February 2023
Video making workshop facilitated by artists Pernille Spence and Gair Dunlop
Routine and sometimes invisible, labour is happening everywhere at every moment of the day. Carers, writers, cleaners, artists, computer programmers, taxi drivers, mothers, and strikers; hidden or in plain sight everyone works but where and how is this labour seen?
Inspired by Labour in a Single Shot, a documentary video workshop initiated by Antje Ehmann and Harun Farocki that has occurred in 15 cities worldwide since 2011, artists and filmmakers Gair Dunlop and Pernille Spence will lead a practical video making workshop inviting participants to make a two-minute film that considers perceptions, practices and conditions of labour in our day-to-day life.
The workshop at Cooper Gallery is devised in close conversation with Antje Ehmann.
Participant information
“The task at hand is to present the topic ‘work/labour’ by means of a single video shot; in other words, [participants] will produce videos consisting of only one shot. The topic is work; paid, unpaid, material or immaterial, traditional or entirely new. This assignment formally introduces the foundations of filming, given that [participants] need to find out: When can a beginning and even an end be found if a repetitive process is being shown? Should the camera be moved or stand still? What is the best way to capture the choreography of a work process in a single sequence? Early films told us: Every detail of the mobile world is worth being documented and considered. And they had a fixed point of view, whereas today’s documentary film only too often presents sequence upon sequence because it is undecided.” (Harun Farocki / Antje Ehmann)
The workshop will begin with discussions on the participants’ ideas of a specific type of labour/work to be filmed, the manner of filming in a single shot, the protagonist and location, followed by a hands-on exercise of filming in a single shot.
The participants will be invited to independently make their films after the workshop and submit their Labour in a Single Shot film to be part of a screening event at the end of March 2023.
Eligibility
This free workshop is open to anyone over 17 years old with any level of experience of working with video using camcorders or phone cameras.
Equipment
Participants are required to bring their own video recorder. This could be a mobile phone camera.
Sign-up
Sign-up to participate via Eventbrite.
Facilitators' biographies
Pernille Spence has been creating performance and moving image works since the mid 1990s. She has created work in the sky with a team of skydivers, been lifted into the air by 22 giant weather balloons and devised a series of performances that took place in over 50 locations in the landscape alongside railway lines from Aberdeen to Glasgow.
She has exhibited her work internationally in galleries and festivals such as the National Review of Live Art, Edith-Russ-Haus for Media Art, Germany, Alchemy Film & Moving Image Festival, Aesthetica Short Film Festival, the Australian Centre for Moving Image, Melbourne and >>FFWD:Artists’ Moving Image from Scotland in Shanghai Minsheng Art Museum, Shanghai Biennale, China. She is currently Programme Director for Fine Art at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design.
Website
Gair Dunlop makes artworks which explore the interconnections of people, places, and technologies. He is a senior lecturer and researcher at DJCAD.
Gair was born in Glasgow, and has worked in a wide variety of roles including projectionist at London’s Scala Cinema, museum photographer, and now senior lecturer at DJCAD, Dundee. He is a member of the Nuclear Culture Research Group. His film Soundings made in collaboration with geographers from the Open University, musicians, and residents of the North Norfolk coast was shortlisted for ‘UKRI research film of the year’ in 2019.
About the exhibition
Bringing together the ten-screen video installation Labour in a Single Shot with Farocki’s most celebrated filmic essays; Workers Leaving the Factory (1995), Georg K. Glaser – Writer and Smith (1988), and In Comparison (2009), Harun Farocki: Consider Labour at Cooper Gallery critically questions the technological, aesthetic, and political conditions of making labour visible.
Re-inventing the 'filmic essay', Farocki’s thought-provoking oeuvre investigates how capitalism, consumerism, media, technology and war intertwine with all our lives for the past century. Influenced by theatre director Bertolt Brecht, philosopher Theodor Adorno, and film director Jean-Luc Godard, Farocki’s unique style of non-narrative-filmmaking consistently addresses practices of labour and the production of images that are concerned with understanding, reflecting and confronting modern society.
Read more on our exhibition page.
Access
The gallery is on two floors. First floor has ramped access and disabled toilet.
Second floor is accessible via lift and for wheelchair access via a stairclimber. The workshop will take place on the second floor with some moving around.
Please email in advance if you require lift or stairclimber access so we can arrange support.
Large print versions of the exhibition information handout are available, please ask our Guides.
All enquiries please contact: exhibitions@dundee.ac.uk
Image credit
Amy von Houten, Electrician, Labour in a Single Shot. Johannesburg, 2014. From Labour in a Single Shot by Antje Ehmann and Harun Farocki, 2014.
Funding support
This event accompanies the exhibition Harun Farocki: Consider Labour which is supported by the Goethe Institut, Glasgow.
Cooper Gallery
exhibitions@dundee.ac.uk