LUX presents The Adverts for Season 3 of Canary Wharf Screen

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Art on the Underground has collaborated with leading international artists moving image agency LUX for the third installment of Canary Wharf Screen, featuring three new specially commissioned works by Sebastian Buerkner, Laure Prouvost and Matthew NoelTod. The Adverts will run from 5 September – 2 December 2012.

LUX will present three solo exhibitions on a large format screen situated in the ticket hall of Canary Wharf Tube station. The films examine how image and display function in the public realm, pushing what constitutes the value of an image against a live, shifting exhibition format.

Working alongside the mass of visual material on London Underground and in the context of Canary Wharf as an international centre of exchange and commerce, The Adverts looks at the complex relationship between advertising domain and public rhetoric.

The word ‘advert’ comes from ‘a(d)vertir’ ‘to warn’, but by the late 18th century came to mean ‘call attention to goods for sale, rewards, etc’. Historically then, the advert has moved from a mode of direct, public address to a means for indirect, private sales. This shift, from use to exchange value, is mirrored in the advert’s abstracted and referential methods of communication; adverts clamour for attention, fold back on themselves, enter past lives, questioning their very substance in order to further substantiate their validity.

Tamsin Dillon, Head of Art on the Underground, said: “I am sure our Tube customers will enjoy this latest season of films on our giant Canary Wharf Screen at Canary Wharf Tube station. This collaboration with Lux means we will be bringing passengers some of the best artists in the field of moving image.”

Benjamin Cook, Director of LUX, said “LUX is excited to be working with Art on the Underground for Season 3 of Canary Wharf Screen and to have the opportunity to commission new works which directly respond to this very unique and specific space.”

Sebastian Buerkner, That was your dog, 5 September – 1 October 2012

A continuation of an ongoing investigation into the syntax and structure of filmic representation and its subversion, Sebastian Buerkner’sThat was your dog is a plea for authenticity in a fragmented and ceaselessly restructured context. A stream of animated snapshots reveals the high points of life, a witness commenting on a patchwork of hyper­emblematic, obscured scenes. This protagonist, in intimate conversation with an absent listener, reflects on each image, attempting to reveal its significance. His speech is littered with mannerisms, appropriating impersonal ad­like slogans and third person narration. He is unreliable: each anecdote, visual vignette, sound element, musical refrain and passage of dialogue distorts itself in the random progression of sound over image, audio and video fragments continually building new sequences over the exhibition duration.

Laure Prouvost, Look there and wander, 2 October – 5 November 2012

Look there and wander continues Prouvost’s investigation into miscommunication, misunderstanding and the importance of the audience’s role in the work. Bringing together instructional text and gesture, the work commands the viewer to both focus on and abandon the screen. These directions are interrupted by extracted parts from her feature length work The Wanderer, six narrative sequences based on a script by artist Rory Macbeth who, without any knowledge of German, translated a Franz Kafka novella into English. Constantly playing on this act of displacement, the work expands laterally, questioning the problematic relation between escape and control in the public sphere.

Matthew Noel-Tod, A Season in Hell: Fall / Winter 2012, 7 November – 2 December 2012

Consumption, fashion, death, fetish and economics mutate and circulate in Noel-Tod’s A Season in Hell: Fall / Winter 2012. Continuing Noel-Tod’s examination of the modes of representation utilised in advertising imagery, the work operates through a slight of hand, a reframing, repositioning and radical de-contextualisation. Things appear purposive without purpose, without any particular or determinate brand to sell but yet saturated in the high gloss insistence of the marketed image. They remain hermetically sealed, packaged, they speak but say nothing, demanding instead for some speculative imposition or at least problematised position.

Canary Wharf Screen is an innovative motion picture screening programme that launched at Canary Wharf Tube station in March 2012, initiated and presented by Art on the Underground. The year-long project shows some of the best artists’ moving image, chosen by four of the UK’s leading film organizations and institutions, including new digital commissions and rarely seen films from the last century.

Designed by Sir Norman Foster and intended as the showpiece of the Jubilee Line extension programme, Canary Wharf is one of the busiest stations on the London Underground network. With footfall of some 40 million per year, Canary Wharf Screen has a potentially huge and diverse captive audience.

Canary Wharf Screen offers an insight into the UK’s leading filmmakers and film institutions whilst surveying the strength and vibrancy of London’s arts community through its artists, commissioners, distributors and programmers

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