MIRAJ: The Moving Image Review & Art Journal - Volume 14, Issue 1, 2025

Artists’ adoption and adaption of film have long been underwritten by benevolent, if often underpowered, pipelines of funding. With the devolution of British cultural policy in the twentieth century, however, public subsidy for this marginal practice began to develop unevenly, brokering discrepancies that left artists in Scotland economically disadvantaged for a measure of decades. Holding that artistic production cannot be untethered from socio-economic context, this article advances compromise and contingency as immutable conditions whose sympathetic reconstruction yields much in the recovery of overlooked and dismissed film practices. In surveying the production and circulation of artists’ film in Scotland before 1982 as a case in point, it exposes a formative correlation between policy and the prevailing canon in the United Kingdom. Though an analysis of organizational archives, collected oral and written testimony and the film work of Norman McLaren, Margaret Tait, Enrico Cocozza, Murray Grigor and Lesley Keen, it locates key discrepancies in infrastructure and opportunity which challenge the centrality of national narratives, beckoning a wholesale reconsideration of what taxonomies of practice like ‘avant-garde’ are really upholding.

This article explores how Rachel Rose rethinks the concept of immersion in relation to the quality of flatness in sound, image and projection, which does not refer to transcendence to an illusory space but is thought of in terms of bringing us closer to being in the world as being-with, towards shared vulnerability and finitude. Considering the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, during which this article was developed, I draw on Jean-Luc Nancy’s notions of resonance and sensation to explore the philosophical layers embedded in Rose’s installation Everything and More (2015) that invites the viewer to enter a space journey towards mortality. This wider context is discussed in relation to Nancy’s ideas about resonance, tone and intensity as a tension of being, which are also formally expressed in Rose’s approach to the tensions between gravity and a sense of weightlessness in the installation.

Review of: Curating the Moving Image, Mark Nash (2023)

Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 408 pp.,

ISBN 978-1-47802-044-8, p/bk, £25.99

Review of: Mike Kelley: Ghost and Spirit, curated by Catherine Wood, Fiontán Moran and Laura López Paniagua, Tate Modern, London, 3 October 2024–9 March 2025

Tate Modern, London

Review of: Ricochets, Francis Alÿs, curated by Florence Ostende and Inês Geraldes Cardoso, Barbican Art Gallery, London, 27 June–1 September 2024