Prelude in Air

Throughout Salford Sonic Fusion Festival, contemporary moving image artworks from the University of Salford art collection will be on display to the public, with some being shown during Festival performances.

Christian Marclay: Telephones (1995)

New York-based artist Christian Marclay works in a variety of disciplines including music, performance and visual art. He is a pioneering turntablist, whose recordings and collaborations with Sonic Youth, Elliott Sharp and Otomo Yoshihide, among others, have had a definitive impact on the avant-garde music scene over the last twenty years.

Marclay's acclaimed video work Telephones (1995) is a seven-minute visual composition of footage from Hollywood films that portray both the image and sound of the telephone. The work characterises the cinematic style of Marclay's work and functions as a commentary on the nature of and interrelationship between recorded sound and image turning our attention to the process of hearing and seeing music.

Tracey Moffatt: Doomed (2007)

Tracey Moffatt is one of Australia's leading contemporary artists as well as being an artist of international significance. Her video collage Doomed features depictions of doom and destruction – war, violence and terror – as they appear in cinema.

Doomed comprises cut-and paste editing techniques in a highly entertaining and black-humoured take on the bleak side of our psychological landscape. The soundtrack builds and peaks and is a central device in journeying through the sequence to climactic effect. The music manipulates while being thoroughly entertaining. It is important that the title Doomed has the quality of the not-yet-destroyed. It is a description that is applied to individuals, families, lovers, politics, and nations – an observation made from the outside and yet containing the possibility (or hope) that situations can be salvaged.

Sam Taylor-Wood: Prelude in Air (2006)

Sam Taylor-Wood makes photographs and films that examine, through highly charged scenes, humankind's physical and emotional boundaries. All her works are full of narrative possibilities yet resist any specific symbolic meaning. In Prelude in Air, Taylor-Wood filmed a musician playing a piece of cello music by Bach, but the cello itself has been erased. The lone cellist mournfully plays a Bach prelude. The music and the man are palpably present; the instrument that links the two is absent, evoking a stark sense of loss.

Mark Leckey: Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore (1999)

Mark Leckey rose to prominence with Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore, a collage of found and original footage of UK music scenes and subcultures from the mid-1970s to the early 1990s, such as Northern Soul, Rave, and Casuals. He once described the piece as being about "how images from the past have an effect on you, and can give you this really sickening sense of nostalgia". The screening follows the release of the soundtrack of the film on vinyl earlier this year.

Admission: Free

This event is part of Salford Sonic Fusion Festival hosted by the School of Arts and Media.

For further details on the Salford Sonic Fusion Festival programme as they are released follow:

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