Mark Webber is an independent curator of artists’ film and video who has been responsible for screenings and events at institutions including Tate Modern, National Film Theatre, ICA, Barbican Centre and Raven Row (London), Whitney Museum of American Art (New York), Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris), Kunsthalle Basel, Australian Centre for the Moving Image (Melbourne), the Brisbane, Rotterdam and Oberhausen film festivals and many other international museums, art centres and festivals.
In 2014, I co-founded The Visible Press to publish books on artists’ film and writings by filmmakers. Our titles include “Film as Film: The Collected Writings of Gregory J. Markopoulos” (2014, edited by Mark Webber with a foreword by P. Adams Sitney), “Peter Gidal. Flare Out: Aesthetics 1966–2016” (2016, edited by Mark Webber and Peter Gidal), “Slow Writing: Thom Andersen on Cinema” (2017, edited by Mark Webber), “Lis Rhodes. Telling Invents Told” (2019, edited by María Palacios Cruz), and “The Afterimage Reader” (2022, edited by Mark Webber). Future publications include books with Ken Jacobs and Peter Kubelka.
Major curatorial projects to date include Shoot Shoot Shoot: The London Film-Makers’ Co-operative & British Avant-Garde Film 1966-76 (international touring programmes, DVD release, Tate Britain exhibition and book), Reverence: The Films of Owen Land (formerly known as George Landow) (international touring programmes and book), Expanded Cinema: Film as Event, Spectacle and Performance (live performance series) and retrospectives or events with filmmakers including Peter Kubelka, Ken Jacobs, Robert Beavers, Valie Export, Tony Conrad, Chris Welsby, Babette Mangolte, Andy Warhol and Gregory J. Markopoulos.
In addition to special curatorial projects, from 2000-2012 I presented an annual weekend of artists’ film and video as part of the BFI London Film Festival, and founded the Secret Cinema email list for announcements of events and screenings in London. I have participated in the advisory boards of no.w.here (an artists’ moving image laboratory and education provider), Nottingham Contemporary public programmes, and the Images Festival (Toronto).
My writing on avant-garde cinema and experimental music has been commissioned and published by Frieze, Tate Etc., The Wire, Tank, The Guardian newspaper and elsewhere. My areas of special interest include avant-garde film of the 1960s and 1970s, Andy Warhol and the field of expanded cinema.
As a Senior Research Fellow at the London College of Communication / University of the Arts London (2006-10), I began working towards an oral history of the development of avant-garde cinema from the 1950s to the 1970s. The project will create two accessible study collections of recordings and transcripts of interviews with key figures of the movement, and provides material for a book I am currently preparing. My initial research was funded by the British Academy and supported by the Gershwin Hotel’s Artist In Residence program.
For many of the years whilst I was most active in film, I kept quite about the fact that I was also a member of the popular music group Pulp. I went from being a teenage fan to becoming the band’s tour manager and running the fan club Pulp People. In 1991 I began to play additional keyboards and guitar at live concerts, and four years later I was asked to join the band. I appear on the Pulp albums “Different Class”, “This is Hardcore” and “We Love Life”, and have participated in the reunion tours of 2011/12 and 2023/24. You can read about my work with the band in the forthcoming book “I’m With Pulp, Are You” (Hat and Beard Press, 2024).
Forthcoming projects include :-
Critical Mass: An Oral History of Avant-Garde Film, The New American Cinema and Beyond.
A book and research project on the development of avant-garde cinema from the 1950s to the 1970s.
Peter Kubelka: Tasting the Universe
The first English-language book on the renowned Austrian filmmaker, curator and polymath, based on Kubelka’s lectures, writings and interviews.
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