Keira Greene: Light Signalling

A programme of six moving image works, spanning the past 10 years of the artist Keira Greene’s practice. Keira Greene will be in conversation with Gareth Evans after the screening.

“There is a form of life that tries to find its way to the surface in Keira Greene’s films. A form of being human in relationship to nature, to space, to time, to other humans and other forms of life. A form of being alive.” – Dessislava Dimova

Light Signalling takes its title from the process of movement ‘Skotomorphogenesis’ that a seedling takes through darkness, toward the surface, detecting sunlight above. These six films, in different ways, meditate on movement; the rhythms of seasons, ecological time, landscapes and their specific communities, family ancestry, are all explored in part by moving bodies on screen. There is a preoccupation in the earlier work with esotericism, evolving as an interest in improvisation, working with language, exploring how text, speech and images can be turned into scores for movement, music and script. Greene often collaborates closely with dance artists and musicians to develop this research.

Programme:

Totally on Fire
Keira Greene, 2015, 7 min

Totally on Fire is a conversation across time that restages an exercise from the Esalen Institute, California in the grounds of the secular community Braziers Park, Oxfordshire.The film pivots around a search for something immaterial. The tension lies in the fact that the actors communicate through a silent game of volleyball, with no net and no ball. Their game is of shared perception.

Grain
Keira Greene, 2016, 9’23 min

Grain is a portrait of Anna Halprin’s Mountain Home Studio built by her husband and environmental architect Lawrence Halprin (1916-2009). A voiceover from Daria Halprin, their daughter, and a dancer, actor, and teacher herself, relates an intimate family history. Daria gives tender impressions of her parents, detailing their individual perspectives on social experience, the natural environment, process, design, and movement.

Eustatic Drift
Keira Greene, 2018, 8’37 min

The film opens with wide images of the remote landscape of Dobs Linn, Scotland, significant for its graptolite-bearing strata. The landscape is richly complex in these singled out moments, held at a distance. History is sunk into the fabric of the rock and at the same time in constant change; change is its constant truth.

Correspondência um.
Keira Greene, 2019, 6’12 min

Correspondência um. is a collaboration with dance artist Susanne Mayer, taking its title from a year long correspondence and studio practice. The choreography for this work was informed by our letter writing in which we exchanged ideas about performance and film, and in particular ideas around kinaesthetic empathy.

Folds
Keira Greene, 2021, 7’09 min

Folds is a filmed portrait of dance artist and writer Alexandrina Hemsley that explores themes of intimacy, agency and temporality. Folds is a portrait that reveals a world of micro movements through slow motion, as well as gesturing towards the world outside of the frame, that which was missed but that makes a difference.

Máthair
Keira Greene, 2024, 16’38 min

In 1954 an Irish woman travelled alone to England to give birth in secret in a Catholic Mother and Baby Home, she then returned to Ireland having given up the baby to the nuns. This event is the departure point for Keira Greene’s film Máthair. As the daughter of the child who was left in the home, Greene traces her family story along the matrilinear line, the resulting film enters into the gaps in memory and record.

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Keira Greene is an artist working across film, photography, performance and text. Her work is preoccupied with the social and organic life and landscape of specific environments. Her work is produced through a collaborative and conversational practice of looking, writing and forming enduring relationships. Recent works are concerned with ideas of the body and the experience of emotion, in dialogue with an embodied filmmaking practice.

Moving image works by Greene are distributed by LUX