Since 1972, the British artist and filmmaker John Smith has created over sixty films, videos, and installations that interrogate the language of the moving image. His works, which have been screened around the world at festivals, in independent cinemas, galleries and museums and broadcast on television, subvert putative divisions between documentation and fiction, between abstraction and representation, and between the personal and the political.

The earliest films by the artist, which are characterised by an attention to everyday details, already aim to reveal the effects of cinematic conventions. In the mid-1970s, Smith shared this focus with colleagues in the orbit of the Royal College of Art, where he was trained, as well as other active members of the London Film-Makers’ Co-operative (LFMC). From the outset, the young filmmaker was also fascinated by the capacity of sound, particularly the spoken word, to guide the audience’s perceptions or even evoke concrete images.

Smith is increasingly examining political questions through the lens of the personal and subjecting his earlier films and videos to reflective revision. The artist creates films on the borderline between conceptual art, structural film and documentary film without requiring any prior knowledge of avant-garde forms or artistic references. In this way, the humorous works address the audience at eye level – not only as consumers, but also as producers of meaning. Thus, it becomes clear that the medium of film never presents an objective depiction of reality.