'Under the pink of my tongue, I found love' exposes a single, raw nerve extracted from the flesh of a film currently in development by Jennifer Lauren Martin. The short film collapses the genres of reality television and artists' film, heightening the tensions at play in their conflicts and overlap to a frenetic pitch of emotion. Lauren Martin offers us a critical and poetic narrative window into a format which succeeds based on our appetite for its anti-narrative pretence, holding the explosive moment in early 00’s popular culture which gave us the free-falling candour of Big Brother or Flavor of Love (which now seems impossibly carnal) against the slick skin of Love Island’s masterful manipulation of television production. At stake in expressing this meta-narrative, is the surgical exposition of how the totalising effects of selfhood choke and struggle against the open field of desire. Lauren Martin asks us to witness the extreme edge of the self as it convulses into the inflamed, fizzing skin of ultra-self-awareness...
~ Extract from exhibition text by Christopher Kirubi
Jennifer Lauren Martin (b. 1990, US/UK) lives and works in London. Her films have screened in competition at festivals, including British Shorts Berlin, Berlin (2022), BlackStar, Philadelphia (2021), SOUL Fest, London (2021), Alchemy Film and Moving Image, Hawick (2021), Montréal International Documentary Festival, Montréal (2020), Kasseler Dokfest, Kassel (2020), and European Media Art Festival, Osnabrück (2019). Recent solo exhibitions and commissions include TEETH, Primary, Nottingham (2020); Channel 6, Turf Projects, London (2019); Britain Been Rotten, Cypher BILLBOARDS, London (2019). Recent fellowships and residencies include Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Madison (2022), Momentum: We Are Parable x Channel 4, London (2022), Hospitalfield, Arbroath (2021), Kingsgate Workshops, London (2020), FLAMIN Fellowship, London (2020), and Chisenhale Studio4, London (2017). Lauren Martin was named a Film London Lodestar Artist Filmmaker (2021) and won Best Screenplay at SOUL Fest for TEETH (2020). She is the co-director of the London-based black and POC-led artist workers' cooperative not/nowhere, specialising in analogue film.
