Liverpool Biennial and FACT present First UK Screening of Sharon Lockhart's Rudzienko
Sharon Lockhart, Rudzienko, 2014 (Film Still). Courtesy the artist, neugerriemschneider, Berlin, Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels, and Blum & Poe, Los Angeles.
Sharon Lockhart, Rudzienko, 2014 (Film Still). Courtesy the artist, neugerriemschneider, Berlin, Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels, and Blum & Poe, Los Angeles.
Liverpool Biennial and FACT are delighted to present the first UK screening of Sharon Lockhart’s new feature-length film, Rudzienko. The film will be shown on 17 October at 6.30pm at FACT, with tickets available now.
Taking place in the final week of Liverpool Biennial 2014, the screening concludes a 16 week programme of exhibitions, activities and events across the city. Artist Sharon Lockhart will be present at the screening for a discussion led by Anthony Huberman, co-curator of the Liverpool Biennial Exhibition.
Rudzienko is an extension of Lockhart’s relationship with a young Polish woman named Milena, who at the age of 15 was living in a girls orphanage outside Warsaw at the time of producing Lockharts previous film Podwórka. The new film draws upon Lockhart's research on the influential Polish-Jewish pedagogue Janusz Korczak, whose seminal essay ‘Rights of the Child’ celebrates the often-disregarded voice of the child.
Rudzienko grew out of a series of educational workshops that Lockhart organised at a farmhouse near to the orphanage, for Milena and 15 of her contemporaries. The workshops were led by educator Bartek Przyby? O?owski, co-author of the Polish schoolbook Philosophical Education and Critical thinking. Together, the girls, Lockhart’s educators and the film crew, worked with this philosophical text, developing exercises and activities designed to empower their own voice, and emphasising the specific ways in which each participant chose to articulate their own perspectives about the world.
Together they worked to create a script for Rudzienko, and to choreograph a set of scenes in which the girls’ conversations interact with the surrounding landscape to address topics of children’s agency and selfhood. Notions of freedom, place, judgment and choice are often subject matter in these conversations, whose backdrop is at the same time idyllic and dilapidated.
In addition to the film, Lockhart also created an exhibition of photographs, and a sculptural installation of text works which have been on display at FACT throughout Liverpool Biennial 2014. The exhibition remains at FACT until 26 October and will be open throughout the day on 17 October for guests to view.
Rudzienko is commissioned by Liverpool Biennial and FACT, 2014. Co-produced by the Kadist Art Foundation with additional support from neugerriemschneider, Berlin; Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels; and Blum & Poe, Los Angeles.
