About

About Available Light

Available Light is a new touring commission devised by London based artist, writer and musician, Morgan Quaintance. Presented by Outlands Network, this year-long expanded exhibition explores notions of home and belonging in contemporary society. Expanding from themes in an eponymously titled new film work that comprises interviews with workers at the Edo Tokyo Open Air Architecture Museum in Tokyo, and fragments of conversations with renters in that city and London.

Available Light also includes new formal and conceptual elements, writing, and sound compositions developed by Quaintance. This core body of new work is placed in a changing, configuration alongside other contributions — music, spoken word and moving image — from a range of invited artists.

At Attenborough Centre for the Creative Arts, the programme will be a multi-screen sound and moving image performance, dispersed across the interior theatre space. Georgian born and London-based artist and filmmaker Sophio Medoidze will present readings and images from her new monograph Bastard Sun, a book featuring a collection of photographs taken after the civil unrest in Georgia in the 1990s. The duo of Japan-born and London-based filmmaker Chiemi Shimada and British composer Jamie Man will present the performance Celestial Palpitations, a new work for recorded voice, analogue slide projector and electronics.

A group of musicians including Benjin (strings), Millips (samples and electronics) and Pharaoh Russell (drums) will perform live, playing new compositions by Quaintance and improvisations throughout the programme, accompanied by video fragments that are newly shot and also taken from the titular film.

About the artists

Morgan Quaintance is a London-based award-winning artist, film-maker, writer and musician. His moving image work has been shown and exhibited widely at festivals and institutions including: MOMA, New York; Konsthall C, Sweden; David Dale, Glasgow; European Media Art Festival, Germany; Images Festival, Toronto; International Film Festival Rotterdam; and Third Horizon Film Festival, Miami.
As a composer and performer of electronic and alternative music he’s been active nationally and internationally since the early 2000s, while his writing on contemporary art and culture has helped shape and influence the UK’s new landscape of progressive cultural discourse and debate.
Over the past ten years, his critically incisive writings on contemporary art, aesthetics and their socio-political contexts, have featured in publications including Art Monthly, the Wire, and the Guardian.

From 2012 – 2023 he was the producer and presenter of Studio Visit, an interview-based radio programme for London’s Resonance 104.4FM.

Jamie Man/ 文珮玲 uses the forms of opera, live performance and dark room installations to create works primarily concerned with music and the poetic mystery of the transtopian body.

Chiemi Shimada is an artist and filmmaker currently based in London. Working with analogue (8, 16mm film) and digital materials, her videos and installations explore and interrogate memory, intimacy, liminal states, climate and late stage capitalism.

Sophio Medoidze is an artist and filmmaker whose work interrogates the boundaries between cinema and art, focusing on the concept of periphery. Her poetic filmography delves into the tensions between ancient and modern, local and global, frequently using her native Georgia as both a setting and subject. Her filmmaking practice also extends into writing and publishing as alternative forms of image-making.

Millips is a London-based producer & sound artist. The sounds created have been described as cinematic, spacious, unsettling, atmospheric and post genre. Millips has supplied music for documentaries, short films, books and live installations.

Pharoah Russell is a much-in-demand drummer and percussionist who has occupied the drum stool with up-and-coming Brixton band Ese & The Vooduu People since January 2017.

Benjin is a multi instrumentalist who has toured and recorded with a number of experimental ensembles over the last 20 years. His solo compositions use classical guitar, cello, harp, clarinet, vocals, nyckelharpa, field recordings and found sounds. Aside from regular concert performances, Benjin's music has been featured on 6 Music, Radio 3 and at the TATE galleries.

About Outlands Network

Outlands is an open membership network that supports and unites producers of experimental, interdisciplinary, and performance-led art and music. It is a non-profit National Portfolio Organisation, supported through funding from Arts Council England.