Morgan Quaintance: Available Light Publication launch and in-conversation

Join us at Chelsea College of Arts Lecture Theatre for the film screening of Available Light, followed by an in-conversation with artist and writer Morgan Quaintance and writer and researcher Maria Walsh - chaired by educator and curator Amanprit Sandhu. The evening will continue over at Chelsea Space for the launch of the new publication and a late exhibition opening.

Available Light is the culmination of a year-long performance and exhibition touring project which centres around a new moving image work of the same name and shares the same title of Quaintance’s current exhibition at Chelsea Space.

Whilst the film being shown during this event is not on show within the exhibition itself, the project is re-imagined as an expanded display exploring, through free-association methods and the energetic logic of zines, core themes such as the notion of home, alienation and intrusion.

In contrast to the moving image and performance presentations that have been staged at different venues up until this point, Available Light as an exhibition at Chelsea Space serves as a space for dialogue, with the accompanying publication providing a continuation of this space.

The publication which accompanies the exhibition launches this evening - developed in collaboration with Maria Walsh, writer and Reader in Artists' Moving Image at Chelsea College of Arts, UAL. Using a loose epistolary format, Walsh and Quaintance engaged in an anecdotal and informally theoretical text and image exchange that offers another interpretative frame through which to experience the display and its themes.

The publication will be available for free at Chelsea Space following the in-conversation, alongside a late evening opening of the exhibition.

Event timings

Chelsea College of Arts Lecture Theatre (entrance via main UAL entrance on Atterbury Street)

6.15pm: Doors open

6.30pm - 7.10pm: Available Light screening

7.10pm - 8.00pm: in-conversation between Morgan, Maria and Amanprit

Chelsea Space (entrance via Parade Ground at Chelsea College of Arts)

8.00pm - 9.00pm: Refreshments and publication available at Chelsea Space (exhibition open late)

Please note, photo and video recording will be taking place at this event.

If you have any access needs or questions, please email publicprogramme@arts.ac.uk

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About Morgan Quaintance

Morgan Quaintance is a London-based artist and writer.

His moving image work has been shown and exhibited widely at festivals and institutions including: MOMA, New York; Konsthall C, Sweden; David Dale, Glasgow; European Media Art Festival, Germany; Alchemy Film and Arts Festival, Scotland; Images Festival, Toronto; International Film Festival Rotterdam; and Third Horizon Film Festival, Miami.

His practice remains open and responsive to contemporary experience and so largely eschews the rehearsal of set themes. However, interests in the human condition, the cultic milieu, counterculture, ethnography, the built environment, Afro-Caribbean, African American, East Asian and British histories are all mainstays. Over the past fifteen years, his critically incisive writings on contemporary art and its socio-political contexts have helped shape the UK’s new landscape of progressive cultural discourse and debate.

About Maria Walsh

Maria Walsh is Reader in Artists' Moving Image at Chelsea College of Arts. She is a writer and art critic, publishing books, peer-reviewed articles and magazine reviews on interrelations between moving image practices and feminist, psychoanalytic and philosophical theories of subjectivity. Her current research explores radical forms of well-being in art practices in neoliberal and/or decolonial contexts. This research is interdisciplinary, incorporating theories of performativity and spectatorship, continental philosophy, affect theory and materialist ecology, in conjunction with research on moving image and lens-based artists’ practices.

About Amanprit Sandhu

Amanprit Sandhu is a London based curator and educator with a focus on expanded exhibition and curatorial practices, collaborative approaches to working, and widening participation in the arts and arts education. She is currently Senior Lecturer in Fine Art at Chelsea College of Arts.

Recent work includes co-curating the 2021 Borås Art Biennial in Borås, Sweden and organising the inaugural Brent Biennial in Brent, London in 2020. She was the co-founder of the curatorial collective DAM Projects (2014-20), whose work supported underexposed artists, art scenes, discourses, and socio-political debates in the UK and internationally. Other previous roles include: Interim Curator at Wysing Arts Centre, Cambridgeshire, Public Programme and Residencies Curator at Camden Art Centre, Projects Curator with Art on the Underground, Project Manager for the 2014 Folkestone Triennial and 2012 Frieze Foundation projects, and Assistant Curator at the Liverpool Biennial of Contemporary Art. Between 2017-20 she was a trustee at Arts Catalyst.

In Autumn 2024, Chelsea Space welcomed Amanprit Sandhu to a 4-month residency titled Overtures, Soundings, Ruptures, which offered research time and the opportunity to present Background Music; work by award-winning US composer and artist Raven Chacon at Chelsea Space on display for the first time in the UK.