David Austen’s practice encompasses painting, drawing,
sculpture, and more recently film and shows an unceasing
fascination with people, through myriad observations of
thoughts, actions and relationships, reaching from the
tender to the absurd. Austen’s ambitious new film, End of
Love, created for his Stanley Picker Fellowship at Kingston University, occupies our Project Space. Set on the stage of an empty London theatre, End of Love shows twelve characters who are vulnerable and alienated; they expose themselves as
suffering figures, all are hurt, lost or broken and their performances resonate with a directness and rawness that
typifies Austen’s practice. Referencing theatre, literature, expanded cinema and performance as well as the artist’s
personal practice, End of Love is a poetic expression of
love’s elusiveness, the non-linearity of time, and fleeting
facets of personal memory.

Austen’s exhibition extends into The Yard, with the evocatively titled Smoke Town. The walls are clad with giant billboard posters of the film’s protagonists and short enigmatic texts that read as film titles or characters’ names, which stem from such sources as the gothic novels of American writer William Faulkner and the graffiti on a Dublin cemetary wall. Illuminated by a series of spectacular hanging lights fabricated from concentric rings of steel, The Yard is transformed into an atmospheric space resonant of an other-wordly station platform or the threshold to a gotham theatre.

Screening times:

Tuesday & Wednesday: 10.30am, 11.45am, 1pm, 2.15pm, 3.30pm
Thursday – Saturday: 10.30am, 11.45am, 1pm, 2.15pm, 3.30pm, 4.45pm, 6pm, 7.15pm, 8.30pm
Sunday: 1pm, 2.15pm, 3.30pm