Liquid Architecture and Artist Film Workshop welcome Glasgow based artist, filmmaker and musician Luke Fowler to Melbourne for a one-off screening and performance. Fowler's work explores the limits and conventions of biographical and documentary filmmaking, and has often been compared to the British Free Cinema of the 1950s. Working with archival footage, photography and sound, Fowler’s filmic montages create portraits of intriguing, counter cultural figures, including Scottish psychiatrist R. D. Laing and English composer Cornelius Cardew.

Country Grammar (2017)

Fowler’s film focuses on performance artist Sue Tompkins’ performance ‘Country Grammar’ created in 2003, one of her earliest pieces performed within a gallery context. Tompkins’ performance works begin from her texts – a stream of notes – fragments of signs, observations, seen and heard. These discreet texts are then collated, assembled and edited into longer performances, which are often re-edited and adapted within each performed iteration.

Electro-Pythagorus (a portrait of Martin Bartlett) (2017)

With Electro-Pythagorus: A Portrait of Martin Bartlett Luke Fowler pays tribute to the work and musical ideas of Martin Bartlett (1939-93) a proudly gay Canadian composer who during the 1970s and 1980s pioneered the use of the ‘microcomputer’. Bartlett is hardly recognised, never mind canonised, in cultural life. He researched intimate relationships with technology and was particularly interested in handmade electronics where, as he states in one of his performances: “the intimacy of handcraftedness softens the technological anonymity creating individual difference making each instrument a topography of uncertainties with which we become acquainted through practice’.

For Christian (2016)

“For Christian was filmed during a residency I had at Dartmouth College, New England, in spring 2013. Through Larry Polanski in the electronic music department I met the composer Christian Wolff, who had taught comparative literature at Dartmouth until 1999. For Christian features short extracts from a longer interview which covered a variety of his compositional strategies from writing text scores for non-musicians to indeterminacy, cueing and his turn in the 1970’s to writing pieces with a consciously progressive content. A week or so later I travelled out to his farm in Vermont which he runs with his wife and son and filmed my impressions there. The film is bookended by two of his dedication pieces – one for Alvin Lucier and the other for David Tudor. (LF)

Abbeyview (2008)

Commissioned by Abbeyview artist in residence (2007-2008) Nicola Atkinson Davidson as part of regeneration funding for a deprived housing estate in Dumfermline, Scotland. Rather than choosing a clear stance in relation to the subject of a deprived area, Fowler offers a contingent, at times contradictory, poetic snapshot of a community. The film resists traditional documentary and cinematic representation of housing estates, striving instead to build an aesthetic of ambivalence and hope.

Tenement Films x 3 (2009)

As the winning artist of the 2008 Film London Jarman Award, Luke Fowler was commissioned to produce four short films for 3 Minute Wonder, Channel 4s shorts strand. The four films premiered on Channel 4 over four consecutive nights in April 2009. Entitled, Anna, Helen, David and Lester, they are a series of portraits of four diverse individuals brought together through a shared residence – a flat in a Victorian tenement in the West End of Glasgow. Composer: Taku Unami

Advance The Unknown (2008/9)

I filmed a diary for the period just before and during the course of an exhibition, the film rushes were shown unedited and changed fortnightly. During this exceptionally bright and cold winter I moved house twice, visited friends in Berlin, recorded music, travelled by train etc.