Near Now Fellow Erica Scourti presents Hot Readings (2018), a video collage using ten years' worth of public performances to reflect on her life, work and evolution as an artist.
Special screening and discussion
Thursday 22 November, 6:30PM - 8:00PM
A screening of Hot Readings (2018) and other selected works introduced by artist Erica Scourti, followed by a discussion with input from Near Now Studio Members on themes including bodily/vocal surveillance and voice recognition tools, use of AI to replicate human attributes through code, automation of affectation, self-therapy and self-experimentation, and the use of digital archiving and life-writing/autobiography in artists' practice.
Hot Readings (2018), a short film giving an insight into Erica's artistic practice, was commissioned through the Near Now Fellowship, supported using public funding by Arts Council England.
Looped video screening
Saturday 17 - Sunday 25 November, all day
Watch Hot Readings (2018) on Broadway's lower ground floor, by Screen 3 and 4.
Duration: 12mins, looping.
Rather than presenting an entirely new artwork, she instead considers her existing corpus and her evolution as an artist; as she states in the voiceover, “You could call it a performance review”. Collaged together, they show key fragments of past work: from early performances in which Scourti screams in public places, to video diaries made in her bedroom. These have all been uploaded to YouTube; the automatic subtitle function forms the source of texts onscreen. Scourti narrates these idiosyncratically: there are deviations, tangents, telling hesitations before and between words.
— Isabella Smith on Hot Readings (2018) at Erica Scourti: Spill Sections, a solo exhibition at Studio RCA, London. From the April 2018 issue of ArtReview.
Hot Readings (2018) is also showing in New York until Jan 2019, as part of the High Line outdoor video art programme.
About the artist
Erica Scourti was born in Athens, Greece and is now based in London and Athens. Her work draws on performative autobiography to explore the ways identity is tracked, mediated and narrated through biosociotechnical systems. It has been shown internationally at spaces like the Wellcome Collection, Kunsthalle Wien, Microscope Gallery; New York, Hayward Gallery, Munich Kunstverein, EMST Athens, Autoitalia and South London Gallery. She has published essays in Documents of Contemporary Art: Information (2016, MIT Press) and Fiction as Method (2017, Sternberg) and started a practice-based PhD at Goldsmiths, London in September 2018.
