Film programme: ’Abandoned Goods’ by Pia Borg & Edward Lawrenson + ‘Receding Triangular Square’ by Virlani Rupini & Dr Leon Tan

In relation to the exhibition Ovartaci & the Art of Madness a film programme will be shown in Charlottenborg Art Cinema

3. – 14. januar 2018

Pia Borg & Edward Lawrenson: Abandoned Goods, 2014, 37:29 min.

Abandoned Goods is a short essay film that tells the story of the journey of the Adamson Collection. Recently rediscovered after years of neglect, the collection is one of the major bodies of British ‘asylum art’. It contains around 5,500 objects (paintings, drawings, ceramics, sculptures and works on stone, flint and bone) created between 1946-1981 by patients in Netherne psychiatric hospital in Surrey. Blending archive, reconstruction, 35mm rostrum photography, interviews and observational footage, the film explores the transformation of the objects in the Adamson Collection, from clinical material to revered art objects, examining the lives of the creators and the changing contexts in which the objects were produced and displayed.

Abandoned Goods was awarded the Pardino d’oro for the Best International Short Film at Locarno Film Festival. It has screened among other places at London BFI Film Festival; Sundance; Full Frame Documentary Film Festival and Oberhausen.

Pia Borg is a Maltese/ Australian artist and filmmaker who lives and works in London and Los Angeles.
Edward Lawrenson is a filmmaker, journalist and film programmer based in London.

Virlani Rupini & Dr Leon Tan: Receding Triangular Square’, 2012,  36:53 min.

Through an unsettling arrangement of sound, voice and moving images derived from on location interviews and footage as well as archival material, the film, Receding Triangular Square, explores Chinese and Aboriginal (indigenous Taiwanese) philosophies and practices of healing as well as the dominant (’official’) Euro- American mental health paradigm. The film relates these to the larger social and historical framework of Taiwan’s development as a modern and post- colonial state.

The film is the result of an interdisciplinary collaboration between the artist and filmmaker Virlani Rupini and the art critic and psychotherapist Leon Tan.

Commissioned originally for the Taipei Biennial in 2012, the project uses the mediums of conversation and moving- image to ’analyze’ colonization and decolonization, psychosocial trauma and repression, and potentials for constructing new assemblages of enunciation in Taiwan (Republic of China).