Holly Antrum

Preview new work | 15-min AUDIO, describing this as script reading favours – the becoming of a narrator, 2021 cloudsandtracks.net

*sitting on the floor of the studio, a poem

The Front End

A friend.

Love
Who has a name that appears in Shakespeare

– never posted a single thing on her feeds.
She watches the world turn itself over
a furore of value –
Love
She consciously navigates below
Sub-marine privacy,
Unfeeding the load to say.
“Is there a mirrored floor in Old-fashioned minimalism?”

Stickers emote solvents into the air, someone must be working.

Intersectional feminism

tap, tap tap, tap

RED, the play, two guys

End period poverty, two guys

No banners (because you organised it, not I)

Love

in the twenty first century –

Intimacy so acute, it goes unregistered.

Still intended

Still here

Still nothing

~~Still~~

Her work and her facial expressions

Unmediated by the serotonin-release of likes.

—

Free bleeding has a sound

In private

Flickering

Alpha-rhythms and grasp private thought process All gone to grasp
Unpeelable and impatient

I’m not here but listening

Still intended
Vouchsafe,

to attribute

so many odes to quiet women.

* some feelings/thoughts attached to resisting a practice nested within the timeline.

Read aloud for We Are Publication at Focal Point Gallery, Southend, October 2018.

+AUDIO https://soundcloud.com/holly-antrum

M.H. (2020-23)

Holly Antrum (she/her/hers) is an artist working across analogue and digital filmmaking, writing and closed live settings. Interviews, poetry and found text, cursive, typed and spoken, centre the importance of language to her work, while a relation to pages and layering comes from her earlier work with printmaking and drawing. Her filmmaking and writing captures tactility and experiential histories, while shifting how a document - written, sonic, or visual - might speak singularly or plurally through its context, questioning how certain spaces and landscapes are inhabited with meaning and influence. The ensuing questions relate her research to oral histories, literary and feminist archive theory, digital justice and the human right to an analogue life and its borderless futures.

Current work focuses on a matrilineal counterpart and character development that explores these areas. Instalments of printed matter for gallery and library spaces (UK and Austria during 2022), a new feature length docufiction film, and her first book of fiction will follow in 2023.

Holly Antrum works independently as well as with individuals and in groups, in peer-collaborations and commissioned and institutional settings. Her creative partnerships to date have branched from personal relationships such as family and friends, overlapping with working formally and informally with a wide range of practitioners - including poets; archivists; captioners; audio describers; art and film students; theorists; activists; other artists, curators and researchers; as well as ecological, spiritual and faith-based communities.

Holly Antrum’s work has been shown in the UK and internationally, in galleries, DIY spaces, cinemas, online and in print. She currently lives and works between London and South West England and is at the last stages of a Techne-funded PhD with Kingston School of Art and British Film Institute. Holly Antrum’s films are distributed by LUX Artists’ Moving Image.

Deconstructed as a distant autofiction for another woman, Markéta H. is invoked into the contradictions and hostility of the present-day UK where she finds herself leaning into the wrong archive to look for her history within. Overlaying the embodied randomness of striking a chord with viewer and viewed, correspondences emerge from pen to paper, database to translation gig. The docufiction film essay explores the becoming of a narrator, and the text (published by JOAN in 2023) sees her voice formed through fragments comprised of a plural set of perspectives.

Markéta H., b. 1976, is the daughter of my mother by a different turn of history in 1948. Now in her forties, Markéta was a young teen at the time of the fall of the Soviet Union’s control over Czechoslovakia - living through the Velvet Revolution in 1989 and the ‘social moratorium’ of the years that followed.

Interviewing women of her generation, the project grows with keywords for Markéta’s interests, becoming archival searches of hers. Interacting with feminist narrators, she researches Peter Wollen in the BFI, where she copies copious quantities of his film viewing notes, and constructs her own portrait drawn from well known and obscure film synopses.

Video: Markéta’s working copies from Peter Wollen’s viewing notes of Pasolini’s Oedipus Rex (1967). For viewing beside the film as found on YouTube (Italian only).