STIM CINEMA
Dir. Sam Chown Ahern, Georgia Kumari Bradburn, Benjamin Brown, Steven Eastwood, Robin Elliott-Knowles, Lucy Walker.
Prod. Whalebone Films, Gilly Fox
Three screen installation (UK 2024, 18 mins, 16mm)
Currently touring
Stim Cinema is a touring exhibition that explores the action of stimming - the practice of physical repetition as a way of taking sensory pleasure in recurrence, or of expressing and alleviating anxiety, and a common trait of autistic experience. Through connecting delight in repetition to the birth of cinema and to contemporary fascination with GIFS, the artwork invites the audience to take pleasure in discovering hidden repetitive movements, reminding us all of the joy we share in seeing actions rock and loop, and revealing that such stimulation is not only common to autistic experience but in the DNA of the moving image.
The exhibition encourages the viewer to consider our shared neurodiversity, and to discover stimming as a joyous perceptual and bodily possibility, one which challenges the very notion of normativity and is in fact a desirable state.
Stim Cinema opened at Nottingham Castle in November 2023 and ran until May 2024, displayed to over 10,000 people. It is currently at the Grundy Art Gallery in Blackpool until 14th December 2024.
The exhibition is made up of three rooms. The first contains 5 zoetropes, introducing the concept of the stim or repeated action through early moving image devices. The second room contains the three screen installation film on a loop, and the third room displays props, ephemera and concept work from the creative process.
Funded by Film London Artists’ Moving Image Network (FLAMIN), Arts Council England, the Wellcome Trust and Queen Mary University of London.
