Andrew Kötting: The Dead Wait

DOORS OPEN FROM 6pm

Andrew Kötting: The Dead Wait

Andrew presents his latest work and the latest in “The London Adventures” series of limited edition publications from The Three Impostors.

We are thrilled that Andrew will be joined on the night by Iain Sinclair and John Rogers .

Andrew Kötting is one of Britain’s most intriguing artists, and perhaps the only film-maker currently practising who could be said to have taken to heart the spirit of visionary curiosity and hybrid creativity exemplified by the late Derek Jarman. His twenty year oeuvre to date has moved from early live-art inflected, often absurdist pieces, through darkly comic shorts teasing out the melancholy surrealism at the heart of contemporary Englishness to seven resolutely independent feature films that take landscape and journeys as the springboards for visually striking and structurally inventive enquiries into identity, belonging, history and notions of community. It is his openness and outlaw intelligence and compelling wit that marks out his work as both vital and important.”

Gareth Evans, Curator, Whitechapel Gallery.

Andrew Kötting was born in Elmstead Woods in 1959. Since 1982, as well as performances, installations and publications, he has made over one hundred film and video works that have been shown in cinemas, art galleries and on television around the world and awarded prizes at many international film festivals. He currently lives and works between Hastings in England and Fougax-et-Barrineuf in the forests of the French Pyrenees. He teaches part-time at the University for the Creative Arts, Canterbury where he is Professor of Time Based Media.

Iain SInclair is a British writer and film maker. Much of his work is rooted in London, most recently within the influences of psychogeography.

Sinclair’s education includes studies at Trinity College, Dublin, where he edited Icarus, the Courtauld Institute of Art (University of London), and the London School of Film Technique (now the London Film School).

His early work was mostly poetry, much of it published by his own small press, Albion Village Press. He was (and remains) closely connected with the British avantgarde poetry scene of the 1960s and 1970s – authors such as J.H. Prynne, Douglas Oliver, Peter Ackroyd and Brian Catling are often quoted in his work and even turn up in fictionalized form as characters; later on, taking over from John Muckle, Sinclair edited the Paladin Poetry Series and, in 1996, the Picador anthology Conductors of Chaos.

His early books Lud Heat (1975) and Suicide Bridge (1979) were a mixture of essay, fiction and poetry; they were followed by White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings (1987), a novel juxtaposing the tale of a disreputable band of bookdealers on the hunt for a priceless copy of Arthur Conan Doyle’s A Study in Scarlet and the Jack the Ripper murders (here attributed to the physician William Gull).

Sinclair was for some time perhaps best known for the novel Downriver (1991), which won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the 1992 Encore Award. It envisages the UK under the rule of the Widow, a grotesque version of Margaret Thatcher as viewed by her harshest critics, who supposedly establishes a one party state in a fifth term. The volume of essays Lights Out for the Territory gained Sinclair a wider readership by treating the material of his novels in non-fiction form. His essay ‘Sorry Meniscus’ (1999) ridicules the Millennium Dome. In 1997, he collaborated with Chris Petit, sculptor Steve Dilworth, and others to make The Falconer, a 56 minute semi-fictional ‘documentary’ film set in London and the Outer Hebrides about the British underground filmmaker Peter Whitehead. It also features Stewart Home, Kathy Acker and Howard Marks.

One of his most recent works and part of a series focused around London is the non-fiction London Orbital; the hard cover edition was published in 2002, along with a documentary film of the same name and subject. It describes a series of trips he took tracing the M25, London’s outer-ring motorway, on foot. Sinclair followed this with Edge of the Orison, a psychogeographical reconstruction of the poet John Clare’s walk from Dr Matthew Allen’s private lunatic asylum, at Fairmead House, High Beach, in the centre of Epping Forest in Essex, to his home in Helpston, near Peterborough. Sinclair also writes about Claybury Asylum, another psychiatric hospital in Essex, in Rodinsky’s Room, a collaboration with the artist Rachel Lichtenstein.

In an interview with This Week in Science, William Gibson said that Sinclair was his favourite author.

John Rogers is a writer and film-maker based in East London. John first put pen to paper writing plays, sketches, and stand-up comedy which he performed in London fringe venues. His first book, This Other London – adventures in the overlooked city was published by Harper Collins in 2013, which he followed with an ongoing popular series of walking videos on his YouTube channel. John frequently speaks on the subject of London and walking and has previously appeared on/at The National Gallery, BBC Radio4, BBC Radio London, BBC Radio3, Absolute Radio, London Transport Museum, Conway Hall, Swedenborg Hall, and London Live TV. As a film-maker he directed the feature documentaries, The London Perambulator, Make Your Own Damn Art: the world of Bob and Roberta Smith, and London Overground with Iain Sinclair.

John was ‘psychogeographer in-residence’ for Waltham Forest London Borough of Culture 2019, and was commissioned to create a project for Brent London Borough of Culture 2020 as part of the Brent Biennale.

Three Impostors is a small publisher established in Newport, south Wales in 2012, with the aim of producing high quality, scholarly versions of interesting, rare and out-of-print books, along with other related new writing. Our first project was the republication of Arthur Machen’s three volume autobiography: Far Off Things appeared in 2013, followed by The London Adventure the following year, and Things Near and Far in 2015. We have also published Our Unknown Everywhere, an edited version of a lecture given in 2013 by Iain Sinclair in celebration of the 150th anniversary of Machen’s birth; Machen’s Gwent by Catherine Fisher; and The Fountains of My Story: Arthur Machen and the Making of a Museum by Mark Lewis. Render the Chartists Defenceless by Les James, looked at the transportation to Tasmania of the leaders of the 1839 Newport Rising. In 2017 we began a series of Machen inspired stand alone short stories called Wentwood Tales: Creep by Jon Gower was the first, followed in 2018 by The Tunnel by Catherine Fisher and The Word by Matthew G. Rees: Resurrection by Tim Lebbon in 2020 and Hide & Seek by Richard Gwyn in 2021. Also in 2018 we published a new edition of The Great God Pan and The Shining Pyramid, with specially commissioned illustrations by John Selway; and a biography of Selway, Vigilant Imagination by Jon Gower, in a joint project with the H’mm Foundation. In April 2019 we published Keyhole, a collection of eighteen short stories by Matthew G. Rees, and in June 2019 we released our new illustrated edition of The Three Impostors by Arthur Machen. In December 2019 we published a new collection of short stories by Jon Gower, The Murenger and Other Stories, and in 2021 we released a novel by Dylan Moore, Many Rivers to Cross. In 2022 a new edition of The Chronicle of Clemendy by Arthur Machen with illustrations by Jon Langford, and the final story in the Wentwood Tales series, Eloko by Mike Buckingham were published.