The Stuff of Life – a short film programme curated by Ricarda Vidal as part of the show “Real Life” curated by Sarah Sparkes

Portman Gallery, London, 15 March 2008

Behind every image there is a story and behind every story there is an image. Though one is inclined to think that there is more to life than what we see, that one has to tear away the veil of appearance and scratch the surface to find the truth of ‘real life’, sometimes it is the surface that tells us more than the stories behind it.

The films of ‘The Stuff of Life’ all explore the art and artifice of story-telling. At the core of all of them there is a real event, an experience of ‘real life’. Films by Matthias Müller, Ireneusz ‘Parkos’ Prokopiuk, Robert Seidel, Zhenchen Liu, Daan Milius & Tim Rutten, Hervé Constant, Yasu Ichige, Ming-Chieh Sung. Several of the films are directly from the BoSs Archive – some have never been shown in the UK before.

The programme also includes three shorts made by the art students of Morpeth School during a four-week workshop led by Josephine Wood.

You can watch trailers at vids.myspace.com

The Stuff of Life is part of the show Real Life.

Real Life curated by Sarah Sparkes, Portman Gallery, Portman Place, London E2 0PX, 7-15 March 2008

What is real? How can we be sure that this world is nothing more than an illusion, and that life is just a dream? Real life is an exhibition in which artists use film and photography as a means to capture their own sensations and experience of the external, whether analytical, intellectual or emotional, and allow us a transitory, illuminated insight into the world from behind their eyes.

artists: Layla Curtis, CMPW, Gordon Beswick and Harry Pye, Lizzie Hughes, Romain Forquy, Axel Stockburger, Heidi Stokes, Geraldine Swayne, Andrew Cooper and Sarah Sparkes (fabrication of Agit Train Cinema)

http://www.sarahsparkes.com/reallife.html