Art & Compromise (IV): 15mm Films

Members of the collective in conversation with artist Monica Ross.

15mm Films is a collective of disability artists based in the UK who take an experimental approach to collaboration in their delivery of visual art works – primarily video that is informed by performance. Unusually, the artists in 15mm are differently-disabled, coming to focus on shared experiences of social exclusion under the philosophical banner of access rather than impairment-identity. They believe that much of the social pressure that goes by the name of ‘disability politics’ is ineffectually sanctioned – absorbed ‘top down’ by institutions running a tick box regime, rather than through grass-roots activism.

15mm Films follows the social model of disability and the main barrier to social inclusion, the one that we target, is the normative world’s perception and prejudices about us… We make irreverent, anarchic comedies representative of ‘crip humour’ in general, while also being willing to formally experiment; a factor that marks us out as maverick misfits in relation to the disability arts community itself. Aaron Williamson, Artistic Director, 15mm Films.

Their most recent project, The Way Out, is currently exhibiting at Beaconsfield and addresses the fact that disability has never had its revolutionary moment - no Suffrage, Stonewall or Watts Riots. This new artwork comprises a series of trailers for a sequence of films that weren’t made, about a revolution that never happened. The movie is a hole at the centre of the parody – the missing film about an absent revolution, an entity become myth – identifiable with the frustrations and invisibility of disability politics per se.

Current members of the collective are Aaron Williamson (Artistic Director), Katherine Araniello (Editor), Laurence Harvey, Simon Raven, Juliet Robson and Philip Ryder.

The Art & Compromise series, delivered in partnership with City & Guilds of London Art School, addresses the various forms and occasions when compromise might enter into art-practice and the criteria that might be used to condemn or commend their effect – is there any form of moral obligation still within art’s purpose? Can the negotiations of compromise be catalysts for creative invention? Speakers in the series have been Gustav Metzger, Paul Hobson and Mark Sealy.

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