Picturing A Pandemic

Art and Activism of Survival on Screens from the Women's Health, LGBTQIA, Crip and Decolonial Archive

LUX is pleased to present a new series of screenings, texts and discussions curated by artist and writer Conal McStravick considering what the history of radical and activist video practices can teach us about how to respond to the current COVID-19 pandemic.

Picturing A Pandemic looks to the moving image archive to examine the ways that video as a practice, technology, and commons offers the tools for women, LGBTQIA, people with chronic conditions and people of colour to stage liberations, survive crises as collective and embody activisms past, present and future.

Part 1: Bright Eyes

The series will begin with Stuart Marshall‘s Bright Eyes (1984) a documentary that helped to give shape to and document AIDS cultural activism and the global AIDS pandemic in the US, the UK and internationally. The film is accompanied by an interview between Rebecca Dobbs, Director of Maya Vision and Stuart Marshall’s Producer and Caroline Spry of Independent Film and Video, Channel Four, who commissioned the film. Next week we will show Stuart Marshall’s Over Our Dead Bodies (1991)

Online Exhibition: Bright Eyes, Stuart Marshall, 1984

Reading: Working with Stuart Marshall, A Conversation Between Rebecca Dobbs and Caroline Spry (published in TV essay dossier, ii. Archival activism, queer history and the TV essay: Stuart Marshall thinking through television, with Bright Eyes at Channel 4 Edited by Janet McCabe and Conal McStravick, Critical Studies in Television: The International Journal of Television Studies Volume 14 Number 4 December 2019)