Forms of Circulation

Paul Stewart and Sarah Perks collaborate through their artistic-curatorial practice, often workshop and film-based, bringing together their explorations from empathy to engagement, critical pedagogies to expanded curation, and knowledge exchange to karaoke. Their films have shown at festivals including Rotterdam International Film Festival, Tribeca Film Festival, and Edinburgh International Film Festival. They have exhibited at and collaborated internationally with a wide range of organisations including Tate, ZdHk and OnCurating, Circa Projects, MHKA, K11, Changing Room (Berlin), Manchester International Festival, Hong Kong Arts Centre, and Museum of London.

Test tubes and bottles, cabinets and pressure gauges, microscopes, freezers and 3D printers, pipettes and pipes are all captured hard at work on colour 16mm analogue film at the biosciences and healthcare research facility: National Horizons Centre (NHC). In a unique collaboration between two of Teesside University’s flagship institutions, filmmakers from Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art (MIMA) workshop stories with NHC staff to create a film that explores the wider impacts of the machine processes on human and non-human recipients, for example work on deadly mouth rot in seals, and fruit flies’ role in modelling for Parkinson’s disease cures.

Forms of Circulation #1 will screen in multiple contexts: across National Horizons Centre and MIMA, in Darlington/campus big screens, at further galleries and film festivals internationally.

With thanks to amazing DoP Christo Wallers.

novel ways of public dissemination of scientific research through curatorial methods and new ways of collaborating with interdisciplinary partners towards community engagement