Ben Callaway (GB)

works

still from: tank.tv - program 1

“Ben Callaway has been using video as a means of manipulating found and appropriated footage, and creating montages according to the conventions of film language. These techniques enable him to create short fictional narratives that are as intriguing as they are visually fascinating.
The works are constructed from anonymous, secondary footage taken from a diverse range of documentary, educational, promotional or amateur videos. Ben Callaway stresses the materiality of the medium through different manipulations of the source material: the images are dissolved by repeated analogue transfers, and then reconstructed in digital format, while their speed is also radically altered throughout the process.
An unstable space of perception and interpretation opens up within the relationship that we, the viewers, establish with the works. This space is enhanced by the complex, symbiotic relationship between form and content, between the narrative and the materiality of the medium, and between the moving image and the internal movement of the image.” (Miguel Wandschneider, curator Culturgest, Lisbon)

Ben Callaway (born 1978 in Bristol, UK) studied at Goldsmith’s College before completing his MA at the Slade School of Art in 2006.  He has been widely exhibited, most recently at Culturgest Lisbon (2007), East End Film Festival (2006) and the Whitechapel Gallery (2005).