BlackLab Awarded Berwick Festival Commission

The North East Photography Network and Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival have announced that Mishka Henner and David Oates (known collectively as BlackLab) have been awarded a funded commission to create a new work for this year’s Festival, which runs 19th – 23rd September 2012.

BlackLab were selected from an extremely competitive field of over 100 applications from as far afield as Bangladesh and New Zealand and from across Europe and the UK, responding to the Festival’s theme for this year, Pictures in Motion, which explores the relationship between the still image and the moving image, with most applications coming from artists working across both photography and film.

The newly commissioned 15-min film will consider the nostalgic idea of the photographer as recorded in stills, literature, moving images, documentaries and archive footage and questions whether the role of the photographer will become redundant in a society where CCTV and mass observation are becoming the norm.

Throughout the run of the Festival the work will be installed at Shoregate Icehouse in Berwick, while a one-off World Premiere screening will also take place at The Maltings Theatre & Cinema.

The full Festival programme will be announced on 17th August.