It is rare to see a box of Quality Street chocolates juxtaposed with a pig’s trotter; as rare, perhaps, as witnessing a teenager in spats dressed as a killer whale having a panic attack. Familiarity and logic are, however, thin on the ground in Emily Wardill’s films. Generally speaking, the London-based artist wrestles with languages – visual, cinematic, verbal, musical – not in order to control them but to free them up, as if non-sequiturs or logistical leaps and slippages are closer to the way we process information than the demarcations of conventional logic we more often rely on. This is not to say that her films make no sense – they do, but in a very strange way. They are the least predictable things I have seen in a long time.
Jennifer Higgie, Frieze, 2010
Emily Wardill will talk backwards from her most recent project Fulll Firearms to SEA OAK – tracing a interest in artists film and the relationship between ideas and the way that they materialize. She will try to use work within the lecture and talk about it without explaining it whilst still attempting to be very clear.
Wardill is a London-based filmmaker. She has exhibited widely, including solo shows at de Appel arts centre, Amsterdam (2010), The Showroom, London (2009), the ICA, London (2008), Fortescue Avenue/Jonathan Viner, London (2005, 2006), Standard, Oslo (2008) and the performance event The Feast Against Nature, at PS1 Contemporary Art Centre, New York (2004). She has shown at Tate Britain, Film Festival Oberhausen, Whitechapel Art Gallery, Witte de With, the London and New York Film Festival, MOCA Miami, and at the Venice Biennale in 2011. Her most recent show at the Badischer Kunstverein opens on 26 January.
Today
Ongoing
Water Cooler Talks 2025
Event, 8 – 9 February 2025
Rundgang 2025
Exhibition, 7 – 9 February 2025, 10:00–20:00
Trisha Donnelly
Lecture, 30 January 2025, 19:00
Kerstin Brätsch: Parasite Painting
Lecture, 28 January 2025, 19:00
Emma Enderby: Curating in and out of Place
Lecture, 14 January 2025, 19:00

Emily Wardill
Lecture 25 January 2012, 19:00 Aula, Städelschule, Dürerstraße 10, 60596 Frankfurt am Main