Alex Fry Editor - Art and Fiction Credits

BC/AD – In 2004 renowned artist Ian Breakwell was awarded a Fellowship at Central St Martins College of Art & Design to explore new ways of presenting his Diary, entitled The Diary Re-invented. Later in 2004 he was diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer. The next fourteen months saw a frenetic pace of work, collating forty years of Diary material for future publication and a new audio-visual installation BC/AD [Before Cancer/After Diagnosis], based on his Final Diary. Breakwell died in October 2005; he left instructions for his colleagues to complete his work. The final piece was a Single screen 1 hour photographic morph with accompanying text read by Ian. Shown as part of the Ian Breakwell Retrospective at Quad in Derby, and more recently was included in a history of the self portrait at Turner Contemporary Gallery. More on Ian Breakwell here

UTOPIA - Camden’s Roundhouse is a crime scene. Smoke billows in the main space from a council waste bin; a crumpled pick-up truck sits half-way through the window display of a mocked-up bookshop. It is a city experienced through imagined environments peppered with narrative soundscapes that will reverberate with stories that are personal, political and pertinent to the parallel lives being lived in the world’s biggest cities. Penny Woolcock’s curiosity and craft for storytelling underpins all her work. For Utopia, she spent many months uncovering the stories of Londoners from the most wildly diverse of backgrounds to reveal the hidden narratives of our city. Inequality, consumerism, housing, gentrification, education, crime and social media loom large in a fascinating, multi-sensory world created specifically for our vast Main Space. I created two video pieces with Penny for the installation

Fantastic Cities is the first major art exhibition of artist and director Penny Woolcock, an unparalleled pioneer in contemporary visual culture in the UK. As well as bringing together pivotal works from the artist’s career since 2015, this exhibition will present three new moving-image commissions: When the Same Road is a Different Road (2018), a dynamic new film installation that presents the startlingly different responses of two individual narratives, one the artist and the other a young gang member, on a short walk through the same city streets; When I First Saw A Gun (2018), a honest reflections on personal gun use from a range of diverse people; and Fantastic Cities (2018), a sound and film installation interrogating the mythology of Oxford and Los Angeles, two cities famously represented by fictitious narratives created through film and literature. Fantastic Cities explores the idea that, for many, the lived experience of these cities may at times be more unexpected that fiction.

THE INTENT - A hard-hitting low budget British gangster film set on the streets of Hackney, starring Dylan Duffus, Femi Oyeniran & Scorcher. Dir Kalvadour Peterson, Prod, Femi Oyeniran (Oct 14 - Jan 15)

THE INTENT II - THE COME UP centres on Jay (Ghetts) who has big dreams; but his ambitions are crippled by his allegiance to both his crew and Hackney crime boss Beverley. Dir Femi Oyeniran & Nicky Slimting Walker. (Jan-May 2018)