Rosebud (2013, 8 min)

The censored images in Rosebud were shot in a library in Tokyo. I came across them by accident while researching there in the spring of 2012. The books, monographs on Mapplethorpe, Tillmans and May Ray, were being imported into Japan from Europe when they were stopped by customs officials. Local law in Japan forbids a library from having books with any images that might induce arousal in a viewer. So after negotiations with the Director, it was agreed that customs workers would go through the shipment and sandpaper away the genitals from any contested images. The video is focused on the violence of the action of sandpapering – to the point where glossy black printer ink gives way to the scuffed and bruised paper stock underneath. There’s something intense but also futile in these marks. The video is a study of rubbing against and along different surfaces: the meniscus of water over the print, the elderflower rubbed along a boy’s body. Around the same time as this I was working a lot with a small underwater camera. Carrying it constantly and building up an archive of footage of water - puddles, passages of a submerged camera looking up at the water's surface, the slow rotating of the lens in the meniscus of a river's shallow bed. Text courtesy of the artist.

Radio at Night (2015, 8 min)

James Richards’ Radio at Night (2015) grapples with the anxiety and pleasure of seeing and sensing in an era saturated by technology. Like his previous work, this short experimental video collages together appropriated footage from highly disparate sources: intimate fragments from cinema and medical film, an extract of an erotic movie that documents an imagined Venetian costume party, news broadcasts, negative footage of seagulls flying over the ocean, and imagery of pigs and fish being processed at a food facility, to name a few. Radio at Night is especially preoccupied with the act of seeing and the ways technology makes this sensation mechanical. Accompanied by a soundtrack composed by the artist that includes vocal arrangements recorded with British harmony trio ‘vocal Juice’ refracted through his sampled electronics., Richards confronts his audience with close ups on faces as his subjects’ eyes dart back and forth across the screen.Commissioned by the Walker Art Center with major support from the Bentson Foundation.Isla leaver Yap

Qualities of Life: Living in the Radiant Cold (2022, 17 min)

Featuring Daily Photos and Observational Photos (both, 2000–2007) by Horst Ademeit (1937–2010), and an extract from Hemlock (2022) by Leslie Thornton. Special thanks to Fatima Hellberg. Single-channel site specific video installation, 2K, colour, stereo sound, 17’29”. Courtesy of the artist, the Estate of Horst Ademeit, and Fondazione In Between Art Film

The work is a material and metaphorical endoscope that records and compiles domestic still lifes, detritus, and civic sewage systems into a poetry and music suite to look closer at the private and public dimensions of decay, hygiene, and contagion. Over its stanzas, it focuses with granular attention on the different materials it collects, as if involved in the anamnesis of a self, a body, a house, a city. The film entangles the macro with the micro scale across nonlinear discourses, from the millennial evolution of bees’ social structure—a footage originally filmed by artist and often collaborator Leslie Thornton—to the brief analysis of a body through an MRI scan. One of its guiding forces is a series of images from the archive of Horst Ademeit, whose obsessive, multi-decade imperative was to register the detrimental impact of radiations (or invisible, “cold” rays, as he called them) on his body and his surroundings. In another stanza, various erotic, narcotic, and nostalgic remains from Richards’s apartment and studio are gathered, scanned, and animated into mental conglomerates. Throughout the film, objects and subjects, bodies and images only solidify for a moment before smearing their borders, drifting into something else. Voices and percussions developed with musicians and actors rhythmically emerge and submerge, causing novel interferences. The film poses a survivalist dilemma, or maybe a trick, in the subtly mundane and infrastructural dimension that it traverses.

Interludes (new works mixed in Kunstnernes Hus Cinema, April 2024, 15 min)

Total runtime: 48 min