The Social Life of Film 
Presentation and Screening by Mike Sperlinger 

FAMU, Smetanovo nábřeží 2, Prague 1
Wednesday 20 March 2024

At the invitation of the Woods. More-than-Human Curiosity project, the British theorist, art critic and curator Mike Sperlinger, at the time also the Programme Director of the Office for Contemporary Art in Norway (OCA), came to Prague.

At the public presentation The Social Life of Film, he presented some of his latest curatorial projects focusing on film as a form of collective experience and screen several Norwegian short films he selected for his curated film program The Foggiest Notion: Film, Nature, Nation (2023). Among the screened films was Inger Lise Hansen's Tåke (Fog) (2019), in which the director follows the fog in Oslo, the Azores, Beijing and Newfoundland through several different film and video formats. 
 
Mike Sperlinger worked as the acting Dean at the Oslo Academy of Fine Art, where he has also been Professor of Writing and Theory since 2013. Prior to that he was assistant director of LUX, a London-based organisation for artists working with the moving image which he co-founded in 2002. At LUX he oversaw Europe’s largest collection of artists’ film and video and worked on hundreds of screenings, exhibitions and projects with artists and institutions around the world. His curatorial projects include a series of shows in the U.K. and Germany with the late German artist Marianne Wex; the exhibition Counterimaginaries at Tromsø Kunstforening; and The Social Life of Film, an international congress of ‘nomadic screening collectives’. Sperlinger’s writing has been published widely, including catalogue texts for Ed Atkins, Gerard Byrne and Laure Prouvost. He has edited several books including Afterthought: New Writing on Conceptual Art (2005) and Here Is Information. Mobilise - Selected writings by Ian White (2016).


Image: Film still from Fog (2019) directed by Inger Lise Hansen. 

The project’s partners were the contemporary art institution Kunsthall Trondheim and the residency centres Røst AiR and Ovenecká 33.

The Woods project was funded by EEA Grants 2014-2021 under the Programme Culture, the European Union – Next Generation EU, the Czech Recovery Plan, the Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic, the Prague City Hall, the State Cultural Fund of the Czech Republic, the Office for Contemporary Art Norway (OCA), and the City of Oslo.