Luke Fowler

Tuesday 26 November, Kunsthal Charlottenborg and the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts presents a screening of Luke Fowler’s film ‘Electro-Pythagoras (a portrait of Martin Bartlett)’ (2017, 45 min.). We have invited the artist to introduce the film and afterwards there will be time for a Q&A session.

A prominent figure in Glasgow’s contemporary art scene, Luke Fowler’s work explores the limits and conventions of biographical and documentary film-making. This has resulted in comparisons with British Free Cinema of the 1950s, which represented a new attitude to film-making that embraced the reality of everyday, contemporary British society.

In adopting the roles of artist, curator, historian, film-maker and musician, Fowler creates impressionistic portraits of intriguing figures. As montages of archival footage alongside new recordings, interviews, photography and sound, Fowler’s films offer a unique and compelling insight into his subject.

With ‘Electro-Pythagorus: A Portrait of Martin Bartlett’ Luke Fowler pays tribute to the work and musical ideas of Martin Bartlett (1939-93) a proudly gay Canadian composer who during the 1970s and 1980s pioneered the use of the ‘microcomputer’. Bartlett is hardly recognised, never mind canonised, in cultural life. He researched intimate relationships with technology and was particularly interested in handmade electronics where, as he states in one of his performances: “the intimacy of handcraftedness softens the technological anonymity creating individual difference making each instrument a topography of uncertainties with which we become acquainted through practice’.

Luke Fowler (b. 1978, Glasgow) has exhibited widely and his films have been shown at film festivals across the world. He was nominated for the Turner Prize in 2012.

Admission to this event is free once you have purchased a ticket for Kunsthal Charlottenborg.