»I was punched, I was kicked, I was pursued for some 20 yards down the road by at least 10 men. The horror was, that then they were joined by others, 10, 15, 20... I was lying in the middle of the road with my boyfriend being kicked and kicked and kicked as if I was a dog,« a young man in the film tells of a situation he experienced as a homosexual black man.
In his film Another Decade, the London-based artist, curator, and writer Morgan Quaintance brings together different discourses from the fields of art history, cultural anthropology, and gender studies. Among other things, he engages with the issue of discrimination against minorities, with a main focus on past and present statements by artists, theorists, and other cultural producers on the theme of being different.
The statements are assembled like a collage of found footage material from the 1990s, recently recorded 16mm film, and standard definition video material. The former sound art student Quaintance carefully selected the background music. Suspenseful and resolute beats and rhythms are playfully brought in harmony with the images and spoken text. Like in a kaleidoscope, the video sequences intermesh and blur the boundaries between past and present. And that is precisely the essence of the film. It once again calls to mind discourses on the categorization and suppression of minorities and makes it clear how topical these issues that have long appeared outdated still are. More than two decades have passed since the 1990s, yet people continue to be discriminated against on account of their skin color, and the plurality of sexualities is still not accepted. The 1990s were characterized by a largely unpolitical and monocultural view. Quaintance seeks to reveal this cultural blindness with his work by drawing attention to signs that could serve as portents of a more political and confrontational decade and that promise a future which is long in coming.

Mara Heineke

Artist Statement
2018 was my first year as an artist working with moving image. Previously I used the disciplines of criticism, curating, and broadcasting to interrogate specific discourses, debates, and socio-cultural behaviours and attitudes, inside and outside of the art world. I'm basically committed to agitating for and enacting systemic change, to shifting things towards more inclusive systems of expression and exchange. This works along a personal and professional axis. By supporting or volunteering with grass roots organisations and activist groups, and attempting to act as a morally vigilant citizen in life, my film work is then relatively free to engage with aesthetic questions, and concerns of form, without carrying the burden of some impossible to achieve ethical imperative (i.e. activating some 'passive spectator'). Nevertheless, my socio-political commitments do end up in the work that I produce, but it is important to state that the work is not presented solely as a vehicle for them. I'm always attempting to plot a line between (for want of better terms) the concrete and the metaphysical. Moving image lets me do both.

Morgan Quaintance