A 16mm film screening of works by Luke Fowler and Henry VIII's Wives

Both works, filmed on location with independently composed soundtracks- Fowler's 'The Harbour Doubts' and Henry VIII's Wives' 'The Returning Officer' (both 2007)- complement each other in articulating visual representations of sound and sound making.

'The Harbour Doubts' is Fowler's first 16mm film, recorded while on residency in Rotterdam in 2007 and first screened in Berlin's Rec in April of the same year. This screening at Bad Bad Boys Club will be the first in the UK of Fowler's 'one print' film. A departure from previous narrative works, this film explores another important aspect of his practice: sound and music composition. Recorded straight to print film, his 16mm work captures the various sites in which the independently composed score was recorded. When played together, both the film and its accompanying score are an almost-unsynchronised pairing of visual and audio recordings, depicting at different times their respective counterparts.

Commissioned by Spike Island, Henry VIII's Wives 'The Returning Office', 2007, was filmed on location in Belgrade, Austria, Bristol and Vilnius by the collaborative group. Three films, two of which sharing the same soundtrack, all sharing the same title, explore narrative and the role of the composed soundtrack. For the first time these films will be screened in sequence (previously shown in an installed format), offering the opportunity to consider the developing narrative of the individual films in a sequence-format, and reflect on the function of the soundtrack and its intrinsic relevance to the actions depicted in each instalment.

Both works, to different degrees, use audiovisual technique to manoeuvre an allegorical articulation, with metaphor distinguished from symbol and offering a degree of chance: rather than signifying the perpetual film-moment as a programmed carrier of meaning, both works use unmetered audio/visual associations to offer some fluidity of time-image and allow the soundtrack to materially mark itself in the transitory nature of the work of art as a fragmented passage.