Christopher Steadman

Christopher Steadman resides and works in Berlin, London and New York.  He works in a range of genres including video, sound, photography, text and installation.

His multiple-channel synchronized video pieces have been exhibited widely, including venues throughout Europe,  America and the Russian Federation.  Upcoming in 2013 Steadman's work will be presented in the 'Now & After' video exhibition at Moscow Museum of Modern Art.  In 2012 his work was presented in the Digital Media Arts Forum at St. Petersburg Center of Film and Television and also at the Pro&Contra International Symposium of Media Culture, Krasnoyarsk, with support from the Mikhail Prokhorov Foundation.  Other exhibitions included the National Centre for Contemporary Art in Kirov, funded by the Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation, the Vyatka Art Museum of V.M. and A.M. Vasnetsov, the Moscow Museum of Modern Art's 2012 International Video Art Exhibition for which he received the Jurors' Award.  Earlier in the year his work was selected for Seattle's Center on Contemporary Art's Annual Show curated by Gary Hill, he also took part in XIII Media Forum 34th Moscow International Film Festival, the Berliner Liste art fair and two gallery shows in NYC.  Steadman has received numerous awards and grants, including a British Academy Arts and Humanities Research Bursary and funding from the Austrian Federal Chancellery, as well as fellowships from many international artists' residencies, including The MacDowell Colony, Yaddo and Chateau La Napoule.

Recently Steadman’s subject matter is focused on the centrality of memory, and the articulation of memory as a mutating system functioning within a set of larger cultural and environmental systems.  The exploration of subjects claims for solitude and social belonging are themes Steadman expresses across a range of practices, including photographic and video installations, and present in works that are structurally concerned with time, space, and duration.

For it is within the context of these elements that the psyche of the solitary individual must make sense of both their own and other’s existence.  Steadman’s interest in the notion of chance and metamorphoses brought about by the weight of memory, allows the artist to communicate a tension between the ephemeral fluidity of the moving images and the physicality of the monitors, heightening a sense of weight by the fixed configuration of the installation.

There has been a significant shift in emphasis and power from Christopher Steadman's earlier pieces to his later projects in development, moving from fixed-point performances to saturated multiple presences and entry points. Steadman’s interest in narrative, memory and abstraction lends his work an ability to cross art mediums and transcend categorisation beyond the digital mediums he usually employs. Viewers are able to enter and observe the work in a configured space, while the content instead is often an abstract, fractured, fragmented series of experiences, offered through which the viewer must make meaning.

“Steadman seems to possess one of those rare spirits that serves to remind those around him that there are few pursuits more noble or more fundamental to the affirmation of our human worth than to make art.” (2012)