Claire Hope - Contact

Final screening: Wednesday 12 April at 5.30pm. This will be followed by Artists’ Film Club: Images and Affects at 6pm, a programme of films selected by Claire Hope. More information here.

In Claire Hope’s video Contact (2016), female actors and students perform a series of affectionate interactions. Beginning with forms of touch recognisable from cinema, visual media and daily life, the video goes on to show a range of increasingly creative, physical gestures. The premise of Contact is to depict, in moving images, the kinds of creative bodily intimacy that can be seen between people who are close, or attached but are often absent from visual culture and social media. Hope is interested in how relationships are experienced and depicted in capitalist cultures, and how this can differ from the potential that actually exists between people.

Contact was produced in 2016 during an Arts and Humanities Council (AHRC) Cultural Collaboration Post-Doctoral Fellowship Award in the School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies at the University of Leeds. Contact was supported by Pavilion, a visual arts commissioning organisation based in Leeds.

Claire Hope (b. 1977) completed her PhD in Fine Art practice at the University of Leeds in 2015 and an AHRC Cultural Collaboration Post-Doctoral Research Fellowship in the School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies in 2016. Hope is a UK-based artist working with moving image and performance. Recently, she has produced two solo moving image commissions: Contact with Pavilion and the University of Leeds (2016) and Group Photo, with Gallery II, Bradford (2014). In 2016 she took part in the celebration of Ian White’s life and work and screened Group Photo – both at Showroom Gallery, London. Previously Hope has screened films with Transmediale (Berlin, 2007); S1/Salon (Sheffield), Mains D’Oeuvres Arts Centre (Paris) and LUX (London) all in 2009; David Dale Gallery (Glasgow, 2012); British Artists’ Film & Video Study Collection (London) and Bermondsey Project & Arbeit (London) in 2013, Brunel Museum Tunnel Shaft (London), 2015 among others. In 2012 Claire took part in the retreat on ‘The Self’ at Wysing Arts Centre, UK. Hope is a Part-time Lecturer in Fine Art at Leeds Beckett University, has an MA Fine Art from Chelsea College of Art, London (2004) and is also a former LUX Associate Artist (2007/8).

This is the third exhibition in The Fold, a new public programme of exhibitions and talks presenting five artists connected to the Fine Art PhD – past and present. Organised by the Centre for Audio Visual Experimentation in the School’s new Project Space, The Fold interrogates both theory/practice and audio/visual relationships in contemporary art practice. Download the programme here.
Image: Still – Claire Hope, Contact, 2016.