'Teenage Wildlife'

Curatorial videotheque project for the exhibition 'Nothing in the World But Youth' at Turner Contemporary, Margate, 17 September 2011 – 8 January 2012

Article included in exhibition catalogue for 'Nothing in the World But Youth' Turner Contemporary pp. 17-25

Accompanying catalogue Text: TEENAGE WILDLIFE “You're tearing me apart!...You say one thing, he says another, and everybody changes back again”. – James Dean as Jim Stark in Rebel Without a Cause (1955) directed by Nicolas Ray Teenage Wildlife is a vidéothèque specially for Turner Contemporary’s Nothing in the World but Youth exhibition. The playlist, from which visitors can choose, surveys the rich source of inspiration that film and video artists have found in the subjects of youth and adolescence. Featured titles span the forms of drama, documentary, travelogue and artists’ film and video, and date from the 1920s to the present day. The selections include tales of angst, confusion, delinquency, boredom, sexual discovery, empowerment, and poetic portraits of adolescent work, play and love. The films are about youth and the poignant moment of adolescence, but are a far cry from the ‘teen film’ genre targeted at a young audience. In these works we find that the very subject of adolescence is a ripe area for early-career and established artists and filmmakers to explore in countless innovative and often provocative approaches. Perhaps the indelibility of the very special period of transition from child to adult, with all the complications and thrills it can entail, is the attraction of this powerful subject to create visionary works. Teenage Wildlife’s focus is a global one, and the subject is explored from far-off locations such as the Lower East Side of New York (a twelve-year-old boy’s first experiences of love in Peter Sollett’s Five Feet High and Rising) and Kosovo (the documentary/fiction amalgam of Birgitte Stærmose’s Out of Love). With special reference to Turner Contemporary’s setting, four films showing youth activities in Margate have been chosen, beginning with the colour-tinted Magical Margate (1925) and ending forty-five years later with All go Margate (1970), which sings the praises of the town as a ‘favourite family resort’. Also included are works by acclaimed promo director Michel Gondry, designer-artist Mike Mills, legendary Free Cinema exponent Karel Reisz, and Water Lilies director Céline Sciamma. Selections from the field of artists’ film and video include works by Christine Molloy and Joe Lawlor, Laurel Nakadate and Cordelia Swann. The vidéothèque has been curated by Esther Johnson, an artist and film maker. Her work has been exhibited internationally in galleries and art fairs including Tate Britain, Tate Modern, Zoo Art Fair, ICA, London; Cornerhouse, Manchester; FACT, Liverpool; Istanbul Biennial; Site Gallery, Sheffield; and Sotheby’s, New York; at film festivals and events including BFI London Film Festival, Raindance, Science Museum, London; NASA, California; and International Documentary Festival, Amsterdam. Her work has also been broadcast on BBC television and radio. In addition to her practice, Johnson is an independent film/video curator, and Senior Lecturer in Filmmaking at Sheffield Hallam University, UK. In 2008 she was nominated for the Northern Art Prize. www.blanchepictures.com