New professor for Art and Film as of 1.3.2024: Emily Wardill

Emily Wardill's practice spans film, video, sculpture, photography and installation. It has been an ongoing enquiry into the imagined image – what it is, what it has been used for and how it leaves indelible motes and shrapnel behind it. This has taken her from examples of entropy to case studies on risk detailing fires attributed to paranormal activity. It has travelled from psychoanalytical case studies on negative hallucination to memory palaces and their relationship to colourless vision. From stained glass as an early device to communicate with the illiterate to the filmic technique of 'day for night' - reversing it to reflect on technological vision, performed gender and imagined utopias.

Wardill’s work has been exhibited at KW, Berlin, Secession, Vienna, Gulbenkian Project Spaces, Lisbon, SMK , Copenhagen, de Appel arts centre, Amsterdam, List Centre MIT Boston, The ICA, London , The Serpentine Gallery, The Hayward Gallery, MUMOK Vienna; and MOCA, Miami. She has shown in the Berlinalle Forum Expanded and the New York and London Film festivals. Her work was awarded the Jarman Award in 2010, the Leverhulme Award in 2011 and the EMAF award in 2021. She participated in the 54th Venice Biennale, the 19th Sydney Biennale and GHOST 2565 Bangkok in 2022.

Wardill has taught at Malmo Art Academy, The University of the Arts Helsinki, Maumaus independent Study Programme, University of British Columbia , Central Saint Martins, Academy of Fine Arts Munich, School of the Art Institute Chicago, National Art School Sydney, Städelschule, Goldsmiths University & the CCA San Francisco.

Teaching has always been an important part of Wardill's work. She has developed courses with students that try to blur the distinction between thinking and making – putting reading 'onto it's feet' , performing close up analysis of single works of art or using practice itself as a model for thinking as a social body. Artist film making is imbricated within technology and it's relationship towards our own vision and consciousness. Film making necessitates collaboration and it's proximity to mainstream moving image provides a fertile space from which to create and divert. The intersection between art and film has always been a place where theory can test itself against fantasy, where the powerful to the displaced can tell their sides of the story, where industry influences and disorientates and makers kick against that. Film making is a part of structures of power that are reflected in sight lines of who gets to see whom and where perspectives can be highlighted and shifted. That artists have the dexterity to use this medium which is much younger than painting or sculpture has a fascinating provenance and an important future.