In Focus: Artist Film Programme - Richard Whitby, The Lost Ones

Presented by: Modern Art Oxford

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0	OXFORD: Jericho Tavern
P	Wednesday 17th July, 2019
N	6:30pm

Event information

A series of artist film screenings exploring current social and political concerns including digital identity and communities, perceived gender roles, migration and cultural identity. The film screening will be followed by an open discussion with artist Richard Whitby.


Richard Whitby
The Lost Ones, 2019
Single screen projection
33mins

In Richard Whitby’s video, The Lost Ones, a motley queue of individuals are all seeking salvation. They are people in limbo – whose personal circumstances or economic situations have been suddenly re-evaluated and whose future status now seems conditional on a test that they need to pass. Their fate will be decided, they learn, by an unseen official whose disembodied voice reverberates through the room in which they are patiently waiting, like a malicious spirit lurking within the walls; barking instructions, issuing withering put-downs, or adding seemingly random, byzantine extensions to an already long checklist of tendentious questions.

Whitby’s contemporary parable takes particular aim at the collateral effects of Brexit, and the narrowing horizons of a country where people’s right to remain is increasingly rebuffed or derided and where unwelcome ‘outsiders’ are told to expect to face a so-called ‘hostile environment’.

Richard Whitby (b. Liverpool 1984, works London) makes videos and performances, and writes. He has a PhD in Humanities and Cultural Studies from the London Consortium. In 2012 he produced a solo show with the Royal Standard, Liverpool and has since worked with Focal Point Gallery (2013) and the Bluecoat (2014). In 2015 he completed residencies with CCA Glasgow and Seoul Museum of Art. His book The Jump Room was published by The Old Waterworks in 2018. Richard is one of the two recipients of the Jerwood/FVU Awards 2019.


Other dates in the programme include: Oreet Ashery, Revisiting Genesis (4th September) and Lucy Beech, Reproductive Exile (6th November).