“Non-human and human animals are defined by co-ordinates. Bodies harbor an inextricable relationship to thresholds, architectures, geometry, seen and negotiated spaces, which are profoundly incorporated in them. The combination of these produce a kind of temporality permeated by corporeality, a border and an order, as Jean-Luc Nancy suggests. It is in this sense that animals are not in the world, they are the world. Territory is both the property of the animal and one of its properties. The creaturely are bodied as an anticipatory response to their future life-world, in a sublime wearing of their environment“.
Fearful Symmetry, Phillip Warnell
Biography
Phillip Warnell is an artist-filmmaker and writer from London, a first generation university graduate from a working class background.
He produces cinematic and art works exploring a range of philosophical, poetic and sensorial thematics: ideas on human-animal relations, the political and cinematic imagination, the presence of those with prescient or extraordinary attributes and the poetics of bodily and life-world circumstances. His work is often performative, establishing elements for a film shoot as (part) event, resulting in an interplay between scripted, documented and (sometimes) precarious filming circumstances.
He completed a PhD in 2020 on a decade of collaborations with philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy, supervised by Stephen Barber.
Selected exhibitions:
Our Other Us, Arts Foundation Biennial, Romania 2021
Tiger Lives, Coreana Museum of Art, Korea 2020
Strange Foreign Bodies, Hunterian, Glasgow 2019
Making Nature, Wellcome Collection, London 2017
Museum of Clouds, Tate Modern, London 2018
Welcome to the jungle, KW centre, Berlin 2015
Studio 55, Seoul 2015
Photographer’s Gallery, Vienna 2014/15
Tyneside Cinema Gallery, Newcastle 2015
Extra City, Antwerp 2015
Breathcrystal, Project Arts Space, Dublin 2015
I first saw the light, SLG, London 2012
Sharjah Biennial 11, 2012
Introspection-Extramission, Leamington Spa 2008
Event Forming Bodies, Gothenburg 2008
Matts Gallery, London 2005
Zero Visibility, MOMA, Ljubljana 2004
First Site, UK 2004
Elective Affinities, Agnes b, Paris 1999
Selected film festival and curated screenings:
Jeonju, Korea 2021
MOMI, New York, 2021
Visions du Reel, 2020
Valdivia, Chile 2015, 2020, 2021
MFF Mumbai, 2020
Rencontres Internationale, 2012, 2015, 2017, 2021
DocBsas, Argentina 2019 (retrospective)
Harvard Film Archive, Cambridge 2018
TATE, London 2018, 2015
KW, Berlin 2015
CPH-Dox, 2009, 2014, 2017
New York film festival 2015
BAFICI, Argentina 2015
VIFF, Vancouver 2015
Locarno, Switzerland 2012
FID Marseille, 2008, 2009, 2014
MACRO, Rome 2004
MOMA, Ljubljana 2003
CCCB, Barcelona 2000
Limited cinema/Blu-ray release, Ming of Harlem, Soda Pictures/Thunderbird