Stuart Croft: Eternal Return
8 November 2024 - 6 April 2025
Leeds Art Gallery
Free
“What closure might you bring, what fissure in this untimely loop?”
– Stuart Croft, script for Remetior
Eternal Return is a major exhibition of artist film works by Leeds-born Stuart Croft, the first since his untimely death in 2015. Visitors to the gallery are invited to journey through a sequence of immersive spaces, each containing an infinitely looping narrative film with no distinct beginning, middle or end. The films transport us from the bedroom of a gothic mansion where we eavesdrop on a macabre fable, to the passenger seat of a car on an endless road trip, and from the abandoned film-set of a 1950’s musical, to the claustrophobic vault of a spacecraft flying at blinding speed.
Stuart Croft’s films imaginatively collapse the boundaries between art and cinema, incorporating the gestures, images and production values of Hollywood film into the space of the gallery. Over twenty years and a body of work comprising 17 films, he continually returned to themes of power, recurrence, entrapment and desire. Croft’s films confound and subvert our ingrained expectations of conventional cinema genres such as the road trip movie, the shaggy dog story, film noir and MGM musicals.
Four of Croft’s major film works (The Stag Without a Heart, Drive In, Remetior, and Comma 39) will be shown at Leeds Art Gallery, with others screened as part of Leeds International Film Festival’s spotlight on the artist (from 1-17 November). The exhibition includes the world premiere of Remetior, the last film the artist produced with sound design finished posthumously by his friends and collaborators.
In partnership with the Stuart Croft Foundation and Leeds International Film Festival.
Click here for related events as part of Leeds International Film Festival.
Subtitled and audio-described screenings will be shown every Sunday throughout the exhibition from 11am- 3pm.
Image credit: Stuart Croft, Comma 39 2011 © Stuart Croft Foundation. All rights reserved, DACS/Artimage 2022. Photo: William Martin
Subject to opening hours.
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