FINAL WEEK OF THE FESTIVAL

It’s the last week of AV Festival 12: As Slow As Possible.

This week includes great film screenings at Star and Shadow including our final Lav Diaz film ‘Butterflies Have No Memories’ on Wednesday followed by the Ikue Mori & Maja S.K. Ratkje gig. On Friday there is a Locus+ artist talk and closing party for Jonathan Schipper’s ‘Slow Motion Car Crash’ followed by the closing party for Benedict Drew’s The Persuaders at CIRCA Site. 

It’s the last chance to see many of the exhibitions which end on Saturday 31 March, so make sure you don’t miss Yoshi Wada (Discovery Museum), Agnes Meyer-Brandis (Great North Museum), Susan Stenger (Newcastle Civic Centre), Jem Finer (The NewBridge Project), Jonathan Schipper (16 Saville Row / Locus +), Benedict Drew (CIRCA Site), Sneha Solanki + Marina Zurkow (Vane), Elizabeth McAlpine (Reg Vardy Gallery), Ben Russell (CIRCA Screen), Mark Formanek (Fawcett Street) and James Benning (Platform A). 

If you’ve not listened in yet to ‘Radio Boredcast’, then don’t miss the live online transmission until 31 March, which ends with Analogue Art Ensemble’s ‘ASLSP’ – after John Cage’s composition ‘As SLow aS Possible’.

The Festival ends in slow style, with our unmissable mass participation ‘Slowalk’ by Hamish Fulton at Spillers Wharf Car Park on Newcastle Quayside. Hundreds of people walking very slowly and silently together is the perfect ending to this slow Festival. If you’ve not already booked please sign up here.

Lav Diaz: Butterflies Have No Memories
Star and Shadow Cinema
Wed 28 March, 7.30pm

Internationally celebrated as “the ideological father of the New Philippine Cinema”. Diaz has created one of the most compelling bodies of work in contemporary cinema. In a formerly prosperous, remote mining village, unemployed workers live in economic oppression until the mine-owner’s daughter returns from Canada. The director’s cut of this film about industrial age nostalgia was commissioned for the Jeonju Festival in Korea. A double bill with Independencia by acclaimed young Philippine director Raya Martin.

Ben Russell
Star and Shadow Cinema
Thu 29 March, 7.30pm

Russell’s stunning feature debut is an epic road movie drawing from documentary and ethnography. Set in Suriname and shot almost entirely with 16mm steadicam, in thirteen extended ten-minute shots it follows two brothers as they trek from Paramaribo to rainforest villages of the Maroons. Their journey powerfully mirrors that undertaken by their ancestors escape from slavery 300 years earlier. Ben Russell’s work can also be seen at CIRCA Screen this week... more

Hamish Fulton: Slowalk
Spillers Wharf Car Park, Newcastle Quayside
Sat 31 March, 1-3pm

For the finale of AV Festival 12, this leading British artist devises one of his legendary slow walks for Newcastle. In 1973, Fulton resolved to only make art resulting from individual walks. Devising group walks from the early 1990s onwards, he has completed over 30 across the world, including Japan, Norway and the USA. Fulton’s slow walks are mass participation events, bringing hundreds of people together to walk very slowly in silence as a meditative experience. For AV Festival, the artist leads a group walk on this landmark post-industrial site. Participants are both the art and the audience. To be part of this unique work, please book your place in advance (over 18s only). Further information here, booking required.