Invisible Film, Melik Ohanian

Dates: 18 June – 5 September | Location: FACT, Liverpool

How does memory influence what we see? What part does technology play in shaping both how we see and what we remember?

Informed by scientific research and inspired by historical developments in media technology, Liverpool’s FACT presents an exhibition exploring the relationship between vision, memory and media.

Persistence of Vision brings together the multimedia work of eight contemporary artists that repurposes image technologies, including cameras, slide projectors, magnifying glasses and mirrors, to playfully review and re-imagine how our memories are stored and revived.

Melik Ohanian will show Invisible Film (2005). A video installation that brings radical post-sixties cinema back into visual memory through the image of a film projector standing in a desert landscape beaming a film into nowhere. The film is Peter Watkins’ rarely screened docu-fiction Punishment Park (1971), a landmarkwork on US political repression, but a film deliberately ignored for over twenty years by distributors in the US and UK because of its controversial content.

Other participating artists include: Julius von Bismarck (Germany), Julien Maire (France), Mizuki Watanabe (Japan), Gebhard Sengmüller (Austria), Jamie Allen (Canada), Sascha Pohflepp (Germany), AVPD (Denmark).