Birgitta Hosea
Born in 1965 in Edinburgh (UK)
Lives and works in London (UK)
Birgitta Hosea is a media artist and curator who works in expanded animation and experimental drawing. She studied Film and Drama at Glasgow University and Theatre Design at Glasgow School of Art. Previously Course Director of MA Character Animation at Central Saint Martins in London, where she was awarded a practice-based PhD in Animation as Performance in 2012, she is currently Head of Animation at the Royal College of Art in London. Hosea's work takes a conceptual approach to the moving image that draws upon historical and theoretical research into the discipline. Rather than using animation to create short films, her personal work is concerned with deconstructing conventional ideas about animation and exploring different expanded forms that the recording of time and motion could take. Combining animation, video, interactive technology, drawing, and live performance, her practice explores animism: the vital spark of movement that brings the still and lifeless into motion. She is also interested in how the media that surrounds us and the very movements we make - our gestures and actions - lead us to construct our identity: in particular how we perform our gender identity.
The video on view at KB17 is a documentation of a performance that was done in an exhibition called “gHost IV” that was curated by Sarah Sparkes at the Crypt of St Johns, Bethnal Green, London in 2012. Taking the role of a techno-medium, Hosea channels messages from film and radio through her multiple digital doubles and live projections of automatic writing, electronic ectoplasmic drawing and animation. Inspired by archival research into Victorian spirit photographs, which are amongst the earliest examples of photographic manipulation, this tableau vivant explores the act of mediation that is involved in the digital image making process. It examines the connections between a medium, such as film or digital code, through which a message is encoded, stored and transmitted and the psychic medium, a person who transmits messages from the spirit world. The words in the soundtrack are sampled from two classic films in which human beings mediate between the world of the living and the world of the dead. June, the radio operator from A Matter of Life and Death (Powell and Pressburger, 1946), picks up radio transmissions from a WW2 pilot on the verge of death: “Are you receiving me?” The housekeeper Mrs Danvers thinks she hears her departed mistress walking through the corridors of her former home, Manderlay: “Sometimes I hear her.” (Rebecca, Hitchcock, 1940)
