Art and Space

A film by Duncan Ward and Gabrielle Cardazzo with original music composed by Janusz Podrazik

291 Main Gallery - Crosscurrents Video Programme

Art imitates life it is said, and life is a journey.

This film takes us on an extraordinary visual journey towards a definition of meaning and power of space in art.

Through the juxtaposition of different spaces, cultures and works of art, in Italy, Poland, Arizona, India, Scotland and England, Duncan Ward takes us on a journey of comparison from the Ganges to the Western Isles in search of connections between the art of the distant past and that of the present. Film, the medium which has come closest to portraying the quality of memory, is used here to dissolve not only the time barrier between the art of different centuries but finds analogies in the way that western eyes see, for example the scenes (dream-like in their unfamiliarity) of the boatman who takes bodies to be burned at Varanassi and the colours and faces in a fresco by Fra Angelico.

The soundtrack plays over visual ideas like a fugue, as fleeting statements, fragments themselves layered in poetic juxtaposition.....the film is an eclectic textile woven of ideas, sounds and images constantly connecting, layering, shifting their colours as richly as a seventeenth century Genoa velvet. (Patrick Kinmouth 1997)

Duncan Ward was born in Zambia, educated at Cape Town University and moved to the U.K in 1981. Since then he has primarily worked as a filmmaker, writing, directing and producing his own material. From 1986 he has collaborated with Venetian art collector and producer Gabriella Cardazzo, to make a series of commissioned film works on artists Tadeusz Kantor, Brian Eno and Leon Tarasewicz. The film ‘Art and Space ‘ is their most recent collaborative piece, Ward considers all four films to be works of ‘portraiture’. ‘Art and Space’ is a portrait of an art journey taken over several years, it is part one of the trilogy of art films, ‘Chaotic Mapping’ (part two) and ‘Nagasaki Dreaming’ (part three) are in production. Ward’s film works include commercials, shorts and drama. He directed Christian Crabbe’s 1825 masterpiece ‘Comedy, Irony, Satire and Other Deeper Meanings’ at the Gate Theatre in 1997 and Stanislav Witkiwicz’s 1925 absurd masterpiece ‘Beezlebub Sonata’ in association with the Gate Theatre in march 1988. Ward has written and is producing the third part of his ‘Absurd Devil Play’ trilogy, ‘Antonin Artaud’s Last Two Years’ due to be performed in 1999.