selected curriculum vitae
Education
PhD, Centre for Film and Media, SOAS, University of London
MA equivalent, Interdisciplinary Arts and Media, The Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten, Amsterdam
BA Hons, Fine Art, Central St. Martins School of Art, London
Exhibitions
2024 Delve, group exhibition: Lucía I. King, Pak-Keung Wan, Javier Olivera, Mochu, Mia Taylor, Helena Goldwater. Josep Renau Gallery, Faculty of Fine Art San Carlos, Universitat Politècnica de Valencia, Spain. Supported by University of Brighton and Universitat Politècnica de Valencia. Curated by Lucía I. King
2022 The Portals Project. Part 1: El Umbral - The Threshold, group exhibition: Lucía King, Helena Goldwater, Simon Vincenzi & Wayne Lucas, Bermondsey Project Space, London, supported by University of Brighton
2022 Dissolution, group exhibition, Five Years Gallery, London. Curated by Mia Taylor & Gordon Hon
2021 Loss & Transience, VisionMix program curator of 10 video artists, Hong-gah Museum, Taipei, Taiwan.
2020 Te lo he dicho con el viento (I told you with the wind). Group exhibition, Espacio Santa Clara, Sevilla, Spain
2019 Proyector Festival of Video Art, Madrid, VisionMix presentation/screening incl. films by Ranbir Kaleka & Bani Abidi in Curators’ Talk series
2019 La órbita (14 mins HD Video) + drawings, Galería Aspa Contemporary, Madrid
2019 La órbita (14 mins HD Video), 'Loss and Lucidity', Appleton, + Fabrica Braco de Prata, Lisbon, Portugal.Curator: Diana Ali [group]
2019 Push Book (Performance: Last Sweat of Youth 1988), Edge of an Era archive, edge of an era Curators: Helena Goldwater/Rob La Frenais/Live Art Development Agency
2018 A changing line in the light falls (15 mins HD Video), 'Loss and Lucidity', santoraspace205, Santa Ana, California. Curator: Diana Ali [group]
2017 A changing line in the light falls (15 mins HD Video), 'Future Orbits', VisionMix Screening/ Symposium,
Collateral Event, Kochi-Muziris Biennial, India
2014-15 VisionMix Short Cuts (52 mins), VisionMix Artists, Filmmakers and Curators’ Workshop, Goethe Institute, New Delhi; South Asia Institute, SOAS, University of London
2013 I don’t believe in you but I believe in love, Galería Fidel Balaguer, Barcelona, Spain. Curator: Paola Marugán [group]
2013 Film Fables, El Palomar, Barcelona, Spain. Curators: Mario Paez + Rafa Marcos [solo]
2011 The Warkari Cycle (48 mins HD video), Persistence/Resistance Documentary Film Festival, London.Curator: Magic Lantern Foundation, New Delhi
2009-10 To Part and Return (24 mins HD video), Moves International Festival of Movement on Screen, Bluecoat Gallery, Liverpool; The Bhavan Centre; Asian Art in London Festival; Artsadmin, London; Light Up! Short Film Festival, Screen East, Cambridge; Non-Multiplex Showroom, London
2009 Operation Infinity (25 mins SD video) online + video installation. Collaboration with director/ choreographer: Simon Vincenzi and students, Laban Dance Centre, London
2004-09 At Play (17 mins multi-screen video installation), Christmas Contemporaries, Collyer Bristow Gallery; Summer Season, Artsadmin, London; Riverside Studios, London; Rang Swarm Golden Jubilee Theatre Festival, New Delhi
2009 Sea Values (17 mins 35mm), Persistence/Resistance Documentary Film Festival, Poona India; British South Asian Theatre Conference, Exeter University
2008 In knowledge of ignorance, Films + drawings, Glasgow International Festival of Contemporary Visual Art, Q! Gallery, Scotland. [solo]
2005 Paramontage, British Council, India
2004 Video installations, The Apeejay Media Centre, New Delhi, India
2000 Artist-in-residency, Khõj International Artists Workshop, New Delhi, India
Films have also been screened at Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Oberhausen Film Festival; San Francisco Short Film Festival; Worldwide Video Festival, Amsterdam; Rotterdam Film Festival; Dutch National Film Days (Utrecht); and KunstKanaal.
Awards / Prizes / Commissions include ACE; British Council; Mondriaan Foundation; Dutch Railways Arts Board; Dutch shipping company, Oceanwide; Netherlands Embassy in Rome; Plan International; India Habitat Centre, New Delhi; Sanskriti Kendra, Hariyana; and the Khalsa Heritage Museum, Punjab, India
Founder Curator
2014> VisionMix, an international network for artists moving image and photography spanning India, Hong Kong and the UK. www.visionmix.info
2015 VisionMix Artists, Filmmakers and Curators’ Workshop, New Delhi edition, Phase 1, Goethe Institute/Max Mueller Bhavan, Jawarharlal Nehru University + Shiv Nadar University with British Council, India
2014 Launch of VisionMix, South Asia Institute, SOAS, University of London
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statement
Installation view, Two into one undone at the Galeria Fidel Balaguer, Barcelona, Spain, 2013
King’s practice in film, artists video and drawing has operated between India and the UK for the last twelve years. She has also lived long term in the Netherlands and Spain (1990-2000) following an artist-in-residency at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten (Amsterdam). Whilst living in India, her work spanned activist filmmaking and performance projects as well as film production design, culminating in a PhD research of artists-film and documentary from India that has informed her work as a curator in this field. These relocations have led to questioning the wider politics of cross-cultural collaboration as an integral aspect of her practice, developing new theoretical models and imagined futures of art production and exhibition. Founding VisionMix in 2014 - a cross-regional network of artist-filmmakers, photographers and curators - has fostered a collective exploration of ideological spaces of video and new media art in the public realm.
drawings
The large-scale drawings on this site, (2014-2016), are part of a series under the collective title, Making the land to live on. The proportion of the landscapes and urban scapes pencilled on the Arches paper relates to the aspect ratio of Cinemascope in film (1:2.35), suggesting to the viewer their relationship with film narratives. They are epic in size yet intensely detailed on close inspection. This surrender to the detail is the means by which the artist is able to root herself, projecting onto the paper a variety of imagined, improbable and unpeopled landscapes that could not actually be inhabited. The landscapes are instead metaphors of how we awkwardly struggle to naturalise spaces of belonging in our environment. They follow an anti-utopic drive. The drawings are not idealised vistas but spaces that disrupt the colonising impulse of landscape painting from western art history, or futurist imaginaries of the city in architectural projections. It is important that the scale of the drawings is large, immersing the viewer in the repetitive labour of mark-making that has gone into producing them. This labour, unlike the confidence of urban planners, is precarious and fallible- the scale is slightly preposterous for a simple pencil drawing. Cities in these drawings that may have had a future fold organically in on themselves, becoming living organisms that are prone to external risks. What is concrete and solid can be erased in an instant. King’s landscapes suggest a state of being both within and outside the perception of the body, entangled in the process of drawing.
installation/film
From 2004 King has been developing a series of works between ‘essay film’, ‘documentary’ and ‘artists moving image’. A recent work, Line is a Line, (2016>) also transforms her drawings into minimal animations. Her various films have been distributed in biennales, film festivals, video art platforms, university conferences and artist-in-residency programmes across the world. She has produced/directed a series of installations that explore the authoring processes of stage performers and choreographers, collaborating with Veenapani Chawla, Vinay Kumar, Royston Abel (in India) and Simon Vincenzi and Helena Goldwater (in the UK). These collaborations expand on concerns from King’s drawings where these become dialogues with creative partners. Collaborations are often open-ended and poetically responsive, drawing upon relationships with physical site and body memory. In 2011, an exceptional departure was to film a devotional folk cultural movement in India known as the Warkari, focusing on music and dance that emerges from everyday spaces. The film works often explore thresholds between differing states of reality, or being in the collision between two worlds, particular places of vulnerability. The questioning of what is meant by ‘personae’ not only in relation to the fictional roles from which performers draw their behaviour, but also the transitional states of making artworks, music, dance or performance. This liminal space also stands metaphorically for the various stations that we encounter in the life cycle, in birth, death and transition. King’s films also touch on philosophical questions of time, contemporaneity and tradition, viewed through a political and cross-cultural lens.