Film Screening - Katharine Fry's 'When I'm with you', followed by Q&A with the artist

As part of the IAS Annual Theme Gestation: Bodies, Technologies, Ecologies, Justice, please join us in-person for a film screening of Katharine Fry's 'When I'm with you', followed by a Q&A with the artist, chaired by Dr Rachael Grew.

Katharine Fry works from performance into video, staging unsettling encounters with uncanny bodies as contested boundaries where self and other meet. Her research questions how women’s identities are shaped by the physical and social structures that contain them. By using the home to connect family stories to broader feminist histories, Fry renders domestic settings, usually intimate and familiar, as strange and haunted.

Doll's house stop-motion When I’m with you fuses four women’s struggles against social expectations of femininity to find their "true" bodies in a subversive domestic psychodrama set in a doll’s house. Margot has been waiting in her house for 40 years. Her waiting morphs into desperate attention-seeking. But she does not wait alone. Marie is becoming. Malleable, she tries to fit, slipping through her body and sliding around corners, picking up cues of who and how to be. Marjorie shines effortlessly. Her dream life, her golden exterior, her pretty performance, prove impossible and impermanent. Mother Flower is everything, the beginning and the end. Hers is a body of pure bounty, longed for, nourishing, sheltering. The four women are joined by a chorus of body parts, hands and tongues, mouths and babies. Across grandiose performances, staged death scenes, fledgling steps and displays of fertility and futility, they reveal how hard it is to be a body.

Fry's work is exhibited nationally and internationally, including: Barbican Centre and Birkbeck Institute of Moving Image (2022); Focal Point Gallery, Southend (2021), Ann Arbor Film Festival, Michigan, USA (2022, 2019); Visions in the Nunnery, London (2018); Terror Has No Shape, Camden Arts Centre, London (2018), Alchemy Film Festival, Hawick, Scotland (2018), Oriel Davies Open, Newtown, Wales, (2018); and The Modern Language Experiment, Folkestone Triennial, (2017). Recent prizes include: Hauser & Wirth First Prize and Soho House Mentoring Prize for Black Swan Open (2018) and First Prize for Creekside Open (2017).

Solo exhibitions include Please call me home at Danielle Arnaud Gallery, London (2021); Addressing the Self: Decoys and Consolations at new media art space, Tennessee, USA (2020), with a forthcoming solo exhibition at Savremena Galerija, Subotics, Serbia (2024). Fry completed her practice-based PhD House Arrest at Goldsmiths. She lectures at the Freud Museum, Central Saint Martins and Goldsmiths. She is currently developing a new film The Fur Chest with the Museum of the Home, London, as part of a Doctoral Prize Fellowship at Loughborough University.

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