A first-person tour through the private collection of Ronald Grant and Martin Humphries in Britain with their curator Anna.

'Backstory' investigates the highly skilled art of 'Rear Projection', a widely used tool in film making in the mid 20th century employed in films such as Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo or Marnie. In 'Backstory' Lewis invites the Hansard family, which has been instrumental in the provision and development of Rear Projection for hundreds of Hollywood productions over several decades, to tell their own story of the heyday of the techniques and their decline and disappearance as the they are replaced by new technologies and new tastes in visibility.

23 August 2008 consists of two shots. A brief opening shot, intercut with inter-titles, of the famous Al-Mutanabbi Street book market in Baghdad is followed by an unbroken eighteen-minute monologue, shot from a single, still camera position and simply recording the speaker’s words without interruption. In it, Faysal Abudullah gradually builds a portrait of his relationship with his younger brother, Kamel, and in the process evokes the lives of Iraqi intellectuals of the left, driven into exile in the early 1980s by Saddam Hussein’s regime. Faysal describes Kamel’s decision to return to Iraq in 2003, his work for the new Ministry of Culture and his tragic death at the hands of unknown assassins on 23 August 2008. While the film throws light on little known aspects of Iraq’s political history, primarily it is the story of the two brothers, of Faysal’s devotion to Kamel and their contrasting attitudes to exile and to life itself.

Acclaimed Canadian contemporary artist Mark Lewis echoes the classic city symphony films of the silent era with this breathtaking cinematic tour through Toronto, São Paolo, and Paris’ Musée du Louvre.

2006 experimental short by Mark Lewis

‘Bricklayers Arms’ (2008) by Mark Lewis is a 35mm film, transferred to HD video. Appearing to simulate London’s CCTV surveillance system, while replicating a video game aesthetic, Lewis’ video is a slow zoom and pan of the street corner area immediately before a building. The camera’s sweep captures passers-by, traffic signage, handrails and barricades, area buildings and a bit of the street. The almost featureless modernist building centrally located in the frame is set against a row of London style tudor flats.

PULL FOCUS: GASOMETER shows how illusion and reality are interchangeable. It is engaged with ideas around movement and stillness, and with the different ways that a work of art can be both experienced in time and in turn can represent time. Lewis‘ work highlights, through film, that what is always present in a great pictorial work of art is a depiction embedded in a complex relationship to time.

In this work Mark Lewis highlights the gap between utopian visions and everyday realities. The camera glides around a complex network of empty walkways in South London’s soon-to-be-demolished Heygate Estate, with the seamless movement of a computer game. Every detail is precisely planned and produced, from the perfect spring weather to the child actors playing in communal spaces. We are forcefully drawn into the image as the camera glides through the estate’s narrow paths, creating a metaphor for the linear nature of film itself, always moving on. Through this travelling motion, the architecture of the Heygate Estate is animated as a constant stream of images and information, highlighting how we, as viewers, understand the world around us, and what impact it can have on us.

2006 experimental short work by Mark Lewis

2010 short video work by Canadian artist Mark Lewis