Phillip Warnell
Contact: info@phillipwarnell.com
“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 (Nancy and Visual Culture, Edinburgh University Press)
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. He has held numerous academic posts and undertaken fellowships in the USA, UK and EU.
Between 2017-18 he was a Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies and Film Study Center Fellow at Harvard University, USA. He was a Leverhulme Trust supported artist-in-residence at Warwick University in 2008.
Selected exhibitions:
In Plain Sight, Wellcome Collection London, 2022/23
Tiger Lives, Kim Hong do Museum of Art, Korea 2022
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 2016/17
Welcome to the jungle, KW Centre, Berlin 2015
Studio 55, Seoul 2015
Photographer’s Gallery, Vienna 2014, 2015
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
Le Dojo, Nice 2008
Matts Gallery, London 2005
Charge, First Site, UK 2004
Zero Visibility, MOMA, Ljubljana 2004
Zero Visibility, Genazzano, Castello Colonna 2003
Uncertain Time, Avellino 2003
Madrid Open, 2003
CCCB, Barcelona 2000
Elective Affinities, Agnes b, Paris 1999
Selected film festival and curated screenings:
Pompidou Centre, Paris 2022
Jeonju, Korea 2021
MOMI, New York, 2015, 2021
Visions du Reel, 2020
Valdivia, Chile 2015, 2020, 2021
MFF Mumbai, 2020
Rencontres Internationale (Paris, Madrid, Berlin) 2010, 2012, 2015, 2017, 2021
DocBsas, Argentina 2019 (retrospective)
Harvard Film Archive, Cambridge, USA 2018
TATE, London 2018 (Museum of Clouds forum), 2015
Visions, Montreal 2018
IDFA, Amsterdam 2008, 2014
KW, Berlin 2015
CPH-Dox, 2009, 2014, 2017
New York film festival (NYFF), 2015
BAFICI, Argentina 2015
VIFF, Vancouver 2015
Locarno, Switzerland 2012
FID Marseille, 2008, 2009, 2014
SLG, London 2010
Reel Screen, Beirut Film Festival, 2010
MACRO, Rome 2004
MOMA, Ljubljana 2003
CCCB, Barcelona 2000
Selected Visiting Artist talks (university) & residency venues:
UCLA, USA
Harvard, USA (Radcliffe & Film Study Center)
UIC, Illinois USA
Camargo Foundation, Cassis France
Newcastle University, UK
Cambridge University, UK
Visual Studies Workshop, Rochester USA
Moly Sabata residency, France
LOOP, Barcelona
Asterides, Marseille
Cite des Arts residency, Paris
Warwick, UK (Leverhulme Trust)
Edge Hill, UK
Glasgow University, UK
Coventry University, UK
Kings College, UK
Goldsmiths, UK
RCA, UK
Milan, Italy
Naples, Italy
Ural biennial, Russia
Sharjah biennial, UAE
Middlesex University, UK
Northwestern, USA
George Mason, USA
Gerrit Rietveld, Netherlands
Melbourne, Australia
Selected texts
Fearful Symmetry
Ethical Materialities in Art & Moving Image, 2023
The Thinker, (journal Q&A) Beijing, 2022
A Shared Love
Que Parle Journal, Duke, 2022
An Intelligence of Things
Italian Arts Council, Pamela Breda, 2021
The Skin of Others
Antennae Journal, 2020
Virtual Round Table (on documentary)
Journal of Philosophy & The Moving Image, Portugal, Cinema 12, 2020
Wild Minds
Introductory remarks as symposium convener. ICA, 2017
Writing in the place of the animal
Nancy & Visual Culture, 2016
The Wild Inside
an Interview with Phillip Warnell, Rhiannon Harries
The Zoo and Screen Media, Images of exhibition and encounter, 2016
The Beast with Two Backs
L’ile D’Amour, Berghahn Books, 2015
The Glance as a Blow
Ural Biennial symposium publication, 2012
The beast with two backs
Cambridge University (paper) CRASSH, 2013
Projections of Animality
Paper at the Natural History Museum, 2011
Intimate Distances
Leonardo Journal, 2011
The Sea with Corners
Outlandish artists’ book, 2010
Life-like: An organ in search of a body
Transplantations. Volume 14 Issue 4 pp. 4-10, Performance Research, 2010
Transplant
Transplantations. Volume 14 Issue 4 pp. 12-18, Performance Research, 2010
Radiation
A Lexicon. Volume 11 Issue 3 pp. 105-109, Performance Research, 2008
The Light Emitting Organ (and Thin Slices)
On the Page. Volume 9 Issue 2 pp. 44-51), Performance Research, 2004
Selected performances
Cineteca Madrid, 2019
ICA London, 1999, 2006
Crikey Moses Blimey tour, 1999
First Site, 2004
Golden Years festival, Copenhagen 2007
BraakeGrond, Amsterdam 2007
Vooruit, Ghent 2007
Warwick Arts Centre, 2008
BFI London, 2008
Macro, Rome 2004
Kapelica Gallery, Ljubljana 2003
Galerie du Jour, Paris 1999
Limited cinema/Blu-ray release, Ming of Harlem, Soda Pictures/Thunderbird
VOD release of Intimate Distances, summer 2022