Bouquet film / video 10
Three portraits of Luke Fowler
La Centrale, from Wednesday, November 05 to Sunday, November 09, 2025
For three months, a program of films and videos offers a journey through half a century of moving images, exploring some of the possible articulations between sound, music and image. Through a series of thematic "bouquets" or ones centered on a particular filmmaker or video artist, the program presents the work of emblematic or little-known artists, video art pioneers or film thurifers.
In a dialogue between projected works (room 1) and works on cathode-ray monitors (room 2), between formal, ethnographic and political approaches to sound, the program highlights the uses and practices of the musician's portrait, performance and soundscapes.
Each week, the films and videos disseminate discreet touches, apparitions and motifs, connections between bouquets and nods to the Biennial program: Paganini, a Sony Walkman, Jean-Luc Godard revisited by John Zorn, salt deserts, the Bachmann / Ceresole couple, brass bands and more.
A proposal by Maxime Guitton.
Hall 1
Luke Fowler, Electro-Pythagorus: A Portrait of Martin Bartlett
2017, 45', digitized 16 mm film, color, sound
Courtesy of the artist and The Modern Institute, Toby Webster Ltd, Glasgow
With Electro-Pythagorus: A Portrait of Martin Bartlett, Luke Fowler pays tribute to the work and musical ideas of Martin Bartlett (1939-1993), an openly gay Canadian composer who, during the 1970s and 1980s, pioneered the use of the "micro-computer". Bartlett is scarcely recognized, let alone enshrined, in cultural life. He has explored intimate relationships with technology and has been particularly interested in handmade electronics, where, as he states in one of his performances: "the intimacy of the handmade softens the technological anonymity, creating individual differences, making each instrument a topography of uncertainties with which we become familiar through practice."
Luke Fowler, N'Importe Quoi (for Brunhild)
2023, 9'34'', 16 mm digitized film, color, sound
Courtesy of the artist and The Modern Institute, Toby Webster Ltd, Glasgow
In Luke Fowler's Impressionist portraits of people who have marked his personal and artistic life, the subject is often invisible, the film focusing on his voice, personal objects or the atmosphere of his room. However, Brunhild Meyer-Ferrari is very much present here. Born in Germany in 1937, she moved to Paris in 1959, where she married composer Luc Ferrari. She produced several works of radio art in the 1970s and 1980s, but only emerged as a composer after the death of this pioneer of musique concrète in 2005. Luke Fowler offers glimpses into their lives and collaborative work, while resisting a traditional narrative.
Luke Fowler, For Christian
2016, 6'45'', digitized 16 mm film, color, sound
Courtesy of the artist and The Modern Institute, Toby Webster Ltd, Glasgow
"For Christian " was filmed during a residency I did at Dartmouth College in New England in the spring of 2013. Thanks to Larry Polansky of the Electronic Music Department, I met composer Christian Wolff, who had taught comparative literature at Dartmouth until 1999. For Christian presents short excerpts from a lengthy interview covering Wolff's various compositional strategies, from writing text-based scores for non-musicians to indeterminacy, the signal system and his turn, in the 1970s, to pieces with consciously progressive content. A week later, I visited his farm in Vermont, which he runs with his wife and son, and filmed my impressions. The film is framed by two of his dedication pieces - one for Alvin Lucier and the other for David Tudor." (LF)
Luke Fowler
Born in 1978 (UK)
Based in Glasgow
Luke Fowler is a Glasgow-based artist, filmmaker and musician. He studied printmaking at the Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design in Dundee. He creates cinematic collages often associated with the British Free Cinema movement of the 1950s. His para-documentary films have explored counter-cultural figures such as Scottish psychiatrist R. D. Laing, English composer Cornelius Cardew and Marxist historian E. P. Thompson. In addition to his portraits of musicians and composers, he has also made films and installations that question the very nature of sound. Luke Fowler has collaborated with many artists, including Eric La Casa, George Clark and Peter Hutton, Mark Fell, Lee Patterson, Toshiya Tsunoda and Richard Youngs.
