Dan Guthrie

6 Jun-17 Aug 2025

Overview

Dan Guthrie is an artist who often works with moving images to explore representations and mis-representations of Black Britishness, with a particular interest in examining how these manifest themselves in rural areas. Guthrie’s Chisenhale Gallery commission continues a long-term engagement with the Blackboy Clock, an object of contested heritage publicly displayed in the artist’s hometown of Stroud, Gloucestershire. Two new videos put forward the ‘radical un-conservation’ of the clock; a new theoretical term proposed by Guthrie to describe the act of acquiring an object with the intention of destroying it. A new online platform that indexes the clock’s timeline, from its historical origins to ongoing debates related to its future, will launch at earf.info. Questions of what we memorialise and how we do so sit at the centre of this new body of work, produced and commissioned by Chisenhale Gallery, London and Spike Island, Bristol.

Biography
Dan Guthrie lives and works in the UK. Selected exhibitions and screenings include: Absent Forces, Open City Documentary Film, 2024; Two Films, VOLT, Devonshire Collective, Eastbourne, 2023; Spirit Messages touring programme, aemi, 2023–2024; Selected 13 touring programme, FLAMIN and videoclub, 2023; wave 4, Prismatic Ground, New York, 2023; Forum Expanded, Berlinale, Berlin, 2023; Right of Way, LUX, London, 2023; and Short Film Programme, Whitstable Biennale, Whitstable, 2022.