FTHo

Daily 25 minute screenings at 8pm local time (all time zones)

Padraig Robinson’s Five Short Stories on Fire encounters John Latham’s deployment of books and fire as temporality and event, using the broadcast format as a way to talk about the screen itself as a territory of attention. The commission sees Padraig Robinson experiment with a new direction, drawing on the domestic context of Flat Time House.

The film takes place in one day in the life of The Novelist (Anne von Keller), who is beginning the first day of writing a book called Five Short Stories on Fire. The day follows her through her domestic space; sleeping, eating, writing and researching, where she encounters the environmental historian Stephen J. Pyne (played by himself). During the course of the day the Novelist seems haunted by ‘The Wanderer’ (Francesco Vellei), who may in fact be a fictional character she is writing, one whose relationship with fire is very different from her own. The film begins with the Novelist waking up, and ends with her falling asleep.

Flat Time House is delighted to present Choose Your Own Father the first UK project by Pakistan based artist Madyha Leghari. This new commission derives from extensive archival research into John Latham’s early history in Zambia, fictionalising personal histories of Latham’s father and interweaving these with those of Leghari's own father. Ultimately, she uses the figure of the father as a metaphor to speak about paternalistic order, the fantasy of “The West”, myths of origin and whether one can ever be free to choose our one’s own fathers.

Produced as an outcome of the Delta (Δ) Research Placement for Flat Time House's new online platform, the film is anchored by a consistent voiceover but is edited afresh through code each time it is played. It has an exact mathematical number of permutations but these amount to far more than what is possible to view. In this sense, the film is poised between control and fatalism, akin to how one might imagine one’s influences.

Madyha Leghari is an artist who uses language and its counterpart silence, as a medium and initiator of her work, examining 'silences created by the failures of language'. Following an open call, Madyha Leghari was awarded The Delta (Δ) Research Placement to undertake remote research with the John Latham Archive. 

The Diagram Research Group (DRG), a collaboration between artists David Burrows, John Cussans, Dean Kenning and Mary Yacoob, will conduct four illustrated discussions online that explore their interests in diagrams in relation to Flat Time and Latham’s ideas concerning the unification of scientific and artistic bodies of knowledge and the primacy of time and event (rather than space and matter). 

Each session will be led by one member of the group who will initiate conversations engendering dialogical association and abductive reasoning, whereby images will be discussed and hypothesis presented. Each session will be accompanied by a picture wall of images and diagrams referenced in the discussions and a portfolio of diagrams generated by DRG in response to them. 

Now Forget Everything You Ever Knew is an online exhibition that starts from an untitled, undated poem written by John Latham. Latham’s elusive text speaks to a process of unlearning, through an exploration of language that attempts to interrogate received knowledge. In correspondence with such ideas, Ifeanyi Awachie, Anna Barham and Noa Latham have been invited to respond to John Latham’s writing through the lens of poetics, time and politics. The exhibition, John Latham: Now Forget Everything You Ever Knew presents the poem’s archival document in an interactive pdf format. Through distinct hyperlinked words and punctuation (‘became’, ‘–’, ‘different’) across the text, viewers will be directed to contributions by the invited participants.