Join us for a day of celebration of all things nerd, as we exhibit fanart by artists from all over the world, listen to a reading of fanfiction, and screen two short documentaries on fandom - one starring one of our own programmers (yes, really!)
Doors open from 4pm!
THE ART
From comic books and classic literature to film and TV, media has inspired passionate responses from creatives with astounding talent. Favourite characters drawn in beautiful detail; imagined relationships between unlikely pairs; familiar faces in alternate universes and situations vastly different to what we know.
Captain America as an 18th century Navy ship captain? Boom! Chronicles of Narnia but set in modern-day London? Done! The Doctor and The Master in a time-y wime-y relationship? Hell yes!
When it comes to fan-art, the only limit is the artist's imagination - and as you'll discover in our exhibition, the artists' imagination is truly limitless.
Featured artists:
Begona F. Martin (web | instagram)
Muffy Hunter (instagram)
Priya D. (tumblr) - thanks for the banner art!
Amy from TwoToneArt (web | facebook)
Perry Bakas (facebook)
Kelly K from Studio Mugen (facebook)
All the prints in the exhibition will be available for sale.
THE FILMS
5pm: LARRY SHIPPING RITUAL, dir. Owen Parry, 2016. (8 mins)
Still: Owen G. Parry, Larry Shipping Ritual, 2016. Digital Video (8.01 mins)
A short moving image work focusing on shipping (speculative relationships in fanfiction) as creative methodology, exploring the Larry Stylinson/Louis + Harry ship in 1D fandom in particular.
Owen G. Parry is a UK based artist and researcher working across performance cultures including live art, installation, moving image and writing. He works collaboratively around subjects including minor processes, colloquial languages, and participatory fan culture. He lectures in Fine Art, Critical Studies at Goldsmiths, and Central Saint Martins, London. Visit his website http://fanriot.tumblr.com/
6:30pm: BETWEEN THE LINES, dir. Cassie Yishu Lin, 2017. (20 mins)
Still from We Are Blinding, the performance in Between The Lines.
Between The Lines is a short documentary by Cassie Yishu Lin, a PhD student of Fan Culture Studies. In this film she explores the phenomenon known as slash fanfiction, especially as written by female writers. The film served as part of her creative research method, which is to invite slash fanfic writers to turn one of their stories into a theatrical play.
The segment we will be showing documents the process from adaptation to rehearsals through to the final performance of We Are Blinding, a Chronicles of Narnia story written by our own programmer Kat, who will be there to answer questions along with Cassie and two of the cast members from the play.
“Fanfiction is what literature might look like if it were reinvented from scratch after a nuclear apocalypse by a band of brilliant pop-culture junkies trapped in a sealed bunker. They don’t do it for money. That’s not what it’s about. The writers write it and put it up online just for the satisfaction. They’re fans, but they’re not silent, couchbound consumers of media. The culture talks to them, and they talk back to the culture in its own language.”
THE FANFICTION
8pm: Hannibal Fanfiction Reading
Fan fiction author Muffy Hunter shares one of her stories in the Hannibal fandom with us. Details TBC.