Platform China, Beijing, presents Stuart Croft’s first solo exhibition in China. The exhibition is curated by David Thorp and features three of Stuart Croft’s major moving image works, all of which were completed between 2010-2011. They are each presented as continuously projected installations across Platform China’s gallery spaces.

Stuart Croft is an artist film-maker based in London. His films are made to be seen in galleries rather than in cinemas and are shown on endless loops so that the spectator can enter the film at any point. Each film explores what happens when subjects common to the orthodox linear cinema are shown without a beginning or end and how these ‘normal’ subjects of cinema are affected when they are looped in the gallery space. Do the themes of desire, power and corruption, deception and temptation (familiar from the popular cinema) become more authentic when they are made endless, as opposed to the way they are perceived in the linear system of mainstream narrative cinema?

The three works in the exhibition are:

'THE STAG WITHOUT A HEART' (2010)
12 min continuous loop, 35mm to HD
Funded by UK Arts and Humanities Research Council

In a vast bedroom, an American man mournfully tells a tale to the white pillow of a perfectly made but empty bed. We do not learn who is absent. We do not learn what the man has done. But the story he is telling is familiar to us. It is a moral tale adapted from an Aesop fable and turned into a circular narrative. The story allegorically explores the themes of political corruption, deception, temptation and guilt.

'PALACE' (2011)
2 min continuous loop, HD
Funded by RCA Research Development Fund

Palace shows a couple having sex in a cinema. It is looped, with no beginning, middle or end, leaving us contemplating the relationship between desire and boredom within the artifice of cinematic conventions.

'COMMA 39' (2011)
7 min continuous loop, Super 16mm to HD
Commissioned by Bloomberg for the COMMA series

Comma 39 is a dance film that takes inspiration from MGM musicals, Jean Cocteau, classical ballet, music video and film noir to form a dark meditation on pathos, Hollywood and obsession. It is a circular tale of desire, power and betrayal, in which an aristocratic beauty and a hideously wounded man enact a seemingly obsessive ritual: they endlessly come together, break apart, come together - ad infinitum.

Each of these works focus on the universal themes of deception, endlessness, desire and power. All of the work was made using high-level cinematic methodologies. These cinematic practices are employed in order to ask questions about time, recurrence and the constructed fiction image.

Platform China has an evolving and critical relationship with Western artists’ moving image. In  2006 Chinese Video Now, curated by Sun Ning the Director of Platform China and independent curator David Thorp, was shown at the John Hansard Gallery, UK and PS1 MoMA, New York. Chinese Video Now acted as a catalyst for an ongoing discussion about the role of the moving image in contemporary art in the West and China that has since been developed through a series of exhibitions at Platform China curated by Thorp in which Western artists have been introduced to Chinese audiences - Richard Wilson, 2007; David Blandy UK, 2008; Julian Rosefeldt, 2009; A K Dolven 2010. Stuart Croft’s Films About Death and Dancing is the latest in this series. Thorp has supported Croft’s practice over many years - the Platform China project will be the first solo exhibition on which they have worked together.