Throughout May and June, John Hansard Gallery is pleased to present Missing Time by Morgan Quaintance.
By weaving considerations of alien abduction, cold war history, state concealment and hypnosis, Missing Time centres on the ideas around memory and the loss of memory, as experienced by an individual or by an entire country.
The film presents a kaleidoscope of instances on the subject and rather than taking each concept as individual notions, the film is a gathering of deliberations that speak of memory and its absence in the widest sense.
According to Quaintance: ‘Missing Time is really a film about self-hood, specifically the notion that memory is what makes each of us who we are. So, in that sense it’s not really about any of the specific events in the work, it’s not a film about the Cold War, alien abduction, or decolonisation. Rather each of those elements were chosen to highlight a different aspect of how important memory is for us, whether it’s from a personal, collective or national perspective. In each case, the discomfort or trauma that ensues following the erasure or loss of memory at each of those aforementioned levels, reinforces this. There’s much more happening in the work formally and conceptually speaking too, but I’ll leave that for the viewers to discover for themselves.’
Morgan Quaintance is a London-based artist and writer. His moving image work has been shown and exhibited widely in the UK and internationally. He is the recipient of the Jean Vigo Prize for Best Director (Punto de Vista, 2021), Best Experimental Film award (Curtas Vila Do Conje, 2020), and the New Vision Award (CPH:DOX, 2020). His films are distributed by LUX Artists’ Moving Image, London. Over the past ten years, his incisive writings on contemporary art, aesthetics and their socio-political contexts, have featured in publications including Art Monthly, the Wire, and the Guardian, and helped shape the landscape of discourse and debate in the UK. Quaintance is a Lecturer in Fine Art at Kingston School of Art.