When: 6 May 2022, 18:00 — 19:30
Venue: Birkbeck 43 Gordon Square

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In this special event combining screenings and discussion, Katharine Fry presents for BIMI the condition she calls house arrest through her moving image practice. Her focus is on the body as the boundary where self and other meet and her videos often feature the same barely alive female figure performing limited gestures, connected to her containing environment by her mouth.

Films to be shown:

Creepers (2017, 5:39 min.)

You could have been anyone to me (2020, 13:01 min.)

Cry for Love (2020, 19:48 min.)

d.a.n.c.e. f.o.r. y.o.u.r. d.a.d.d.y. (2017, 7:40 min.)

Her glass flower house (2021, 38:40)

Katharine Fry will be in conversation with Amber Jacobs (Birkbeck) and Maria Walsh (UAL).

House arrest tells the story of desire and shapes the condition of every subject. It begins with the subject’s separation from a lost originary home, a fantasy state of wholeness, and the impossibility of a nostalgic homecoming. The separate subject becomes boundaried, contained in the house of her skin. Externally constituted expectations are projected onto her skin. She performs an unchosen script; cast in a role she has no desire to perform. Her only desire is for home, born at the moment of separation. She moves from object to object, from mother to lover, looking for merger, looking for home. Her desire wants to escape the confines of her boundaried body, to eradicate her body, to dissolve into wholeness. Anxiety appears here too. Now separate, she fears the unknown result of her dissolution into an other. Herein lies the subject’s ambivalence. Ultimately, under house arrest, desire can only persist and, as a body, the figure can only remain separate.

Desire to escape her physical limits pours out of her mouth as animal sounds in Creepers (2017) She marks her anxious need to confirm herself, to maintain her limits, by blocking her mouth with furniture in You could have been anyone to me (2020), and under water with a hose in Cry for Love (2020). She appears as a figure in flux, trying to shake out of her skin and her containing space in d.a.n.c.e. f.o.r. y.o.u.r. d.a.d.d.y.(2017).


The BIMI event is also the second UK screening of Her glass flower house (2021) which premiered at the artist’s solo exhibition Please call me home at Danielle Arnaud Gallery in Spring 2021. Developed during the pandemic and following the artist’s hospitalisation with Covid-19, in Her glass flower house, a body trembles, not on the threshold between merger and separation, but with the repercussions of its boundaries being breached. Here she seeks to shore up the body, putting outside that which has penetrated the body as the progress and retreat of the virus plays out as a shifting sequence of flowers against a hallucinatory backdrop and a cavalcade of food and furnishings in a stop-motion animation set in a doll’s house.