Michael O’Pray Prize

The Michael O’Pray Prize is a Film and Video Umbrella initiative launched in 2017 in partnership with Art Monthly, supported by University of East London and Arts Council England. The prize seeks new writing on innovation and experimentation in moving-image art. Read the winning texts below.

Not to Scale

Bami Oke examines Garrett Bradley’s embodied video reflection on US culture

The Screen is a Drum

E De Zulueta explores the delirious resistance of Mexican filmmakers Colectivo los ingrávidos

Looking at Palestine

Nevan Spier views Palestine through the films of Mustafa Abu Ali and Elia Suleiman

Excavating the Body

Natasha Thembiso Ruwona explores Ashanti Harris’s Black Gold

Queer Territories/Lesbian Lenses

Aislinn Evans critically examines a lesbian relation to histories of the land and landscape cinema

Dreaming Rivers

Leena Habiballa considers the physical reworking of a pioneering film’s 16mm print

In Defence of the Small Screen

Laura Bivolaru on viewing the moving image while moving

I Am a Photograph

Evelyn Wh-ell examines two French trans icons’ focus on image as surface

Going on a Bear Hunt

Dan Guthrie tries to imagine the experience of an elusive artwork

Robert Beavers

Siavash Minoukadeh on the power of oblique suggestion in queer cinema

Blank Space

Ronnie Angel Pope enters a cinematic void

Danielle Dean

Rosa Tyhurst on Danielle Dean’s subverting of the vampiric strategies at work in brand marketing

Out in the Open

Sara Quattrocchi Febles explores how a film can no longer be fixed in time and place when screened outdoors

Alberta Whittle: RESET

Harvey Dimond explores the historical resonances of this slavery-referencing artwork made during a suffocating pandemic

Together, Alone: Watching Sandra Lahire in Lockdown

Rachel Pronger discovers in earlier experimental films a familiar tension between the social being and the individual body

Lutz Mommartz’s Own Private Idyll

Mimi Howard finds that there are oblique ways to engage with tumultuous times

Image Abrasion

Cassandre Greenberg considers Derek Jarman’s Blue as a celluloid artefact in an age of portable digital media

Patrick Staff: On Venus

Laura Jacobs on hostile environments, both social and natural, in Patrick Staff’s ‘On Venus’ exhibition

Bank – Basement – Becker

Adam Hines-Green on the expression of horror through both fiction and reality in the LA video art of Julie Becker

A Long Shot

Dan Ward on artists’s attempts to slow the viewer

Heat Sensitive?

Lauren Houlton on Richard Mosse’s ‘Incoming’