Dr Michael Maziere
Dr Michael Maziere is an artist and curator who studied Creative Photography at Nottingham Trent Polytechnic and Film and Television at the Royal College of Art. His practice encompasses the production of artworks, the curation of exhibitions, lecturing and writing about artists' film and video. Maziere is currently a Reader in Film and Video and before joining the University, he was a Research Fellow at the British Artists' Film and Video Study Collection at the University of the Arts, London.
Maziere previously worked in a number of film and video organisations. He was director of London Electronic Arts, co-founder and director of the Lux Centre in Hoxton Square and Pandaemonium - London's Festival of Moving Images. He was a member of the executive committee of the London Film-makers Co-operative and worked as its cinema programmer and projectionist. His early film works were developed with an attention to analogue film materials and through the creative use of optical and mechanical cameras, printers and processors.
Maziere shows his films and videos internationally, venues include the Tate Gallery, London and MOMA, New York, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin, Videobrasil, Sao Paulo and they have been acquired by the collections of the Musee National d'Art Moderne, Paris, the Museum of Modern Art of Japan, the National Collection of Australia and the National Film Archives of the British Film Institute. His films are regularly selected for International competition at Festivals in London, Oberhausen, Basle, Berlin, Rotterdam and New York.
Maziere has curated moving image exhibitions at the ICA, NFT and internationally and is co-founder and curator of Ambika P3, the University of Westminster's project space for the development and delivery of a collaborative practice-based research project across the Faculty of Media, Arts and Design and the Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment.
Maziere's current research has four strands - producing artists' film and video works, commissioning and curating exhibitions, writing and editing books and convening international conferences.
Maziere is best known today for his work in which Hollywood fiction and autobiographical fact are distilled into a poetic form. Maziere practices what he calls 'cine-video', a multilayered, intertextual fusion of the cultural and the personal, which shifts the emphasis back to the power of individual vision. Through this process the work reconstructs a meaningful subjectivity from the saturated world of images that surround us. His latest film Actor continues his exploration of cinema and memory and has been exhibited in the UK, Germany, Russia and France. He is represented by the Lux, London, the New York Film-maker's Co-operative and Light Cone, Paris, France.
Maziere's work as a curator in both cinemas and galleries has sought to interrogate artists' film and video as a specific historical and international practice, and to question its relationship with both narrative cinema and traditional fine art projects. The individual manifestations of his research projects all support the continually evolving art form of artists' film and video through the commissioning and curation of exhibitions, as well as dissemination through lectures and publishing.
He has curated works by Malcolm Le Grice, Peter Gidal, Dryden Goodwin, John Maybury, Clio Barnard, Tracey Emin, Jane and Louise Wilson, Mark Wallinger, Keith Tyson and Jaki Irvine amongst others. Recent curated exhibitions include artists Chantal Akerman, 2015; Victor Burgin, 2013; Ilya & Emilia Kabakov, 2013; David Hall, 2012; Anthony McCall, 2011and Peter Kardia's From Floor to Sky. His latest curated exhibition was CASEBOOKS: Six contemporary artists and an extraordinary medical archive including artists Jasmina Cibic, Federico Díaz, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Rémy Markowitsch, Lindsay Seers and Tunga.
He writes regularly on the subject of artists' film and video and has produced research on its development. He was on the editorial board and co-editor of journals Undercut and Independent Media and has contributed to journals such as Art in Sight, Performance and Felix. He completed an anthology of writing on artists film and video for Wallflower Press. His own work has featured in seminal books on artists film and video such as Curtis David, A History of Artists Film and Video in Britain, Catherine Elwes, Video Art: A Guided Tour, AL Rees A History of Experimental Film and Video by and Nicky Hamlyn, The Film Art Phenomena.
Alongside selected exhibitions Maziere has convened a series of conferences at the University which explore issues of curation, media and context: Exhibiting Photography, 2011 (in association with The Photographer's Gallery); Exhibiting Video, 2012; Exhibiting Performance, 2013, Exhibiting and Reading Nature, 2014 and After Chantal: An International Conference, 2016.