artist/filmmaker
Midville 2025 3 min trailer
(with Steve Dutton)
Midville’ was the name given to a Midlands Art School in Britain when it was studied by two sociologists in 1967. The resulting book, ‘Art Students Observed’, has become a classic of art reportage, the place where “romantic” and “conceptual” art first collided.
Decades years later I traced the students in the book and interviewed them about their recollections and (sometimes traumatic) experiences.
‘Midville’ is a 13-minute AI supported mini collage ‘opera’, where the students as they were then and now, pronounce their testimonies via AI voices, choirs, avatars, and real-world original footage.
Fluxus Museum exprimental video prize Paros Greece 2025
Not to Scale Not to Scale 2009 Not to Scale 2009 Scale 2009
Not to Not to Not to Scale 2009 2009 Not to Scale 2009 Not to Scale 2009 Scale 2009
War Memorial 2017 27 min
War Memorial is part of an ongoing documentary project about the Calling Blighty films, unique filmed messages home from Burma in WW2. Here the messages recede into the background leaving only doubt and uncertainty.
Nominated best short doc Sheffield DocFest 2017
Not to Scale 2009 10 min
Not to Scale uses images shot in model villages around Britain. These are not just models of buildings but of ideas, shrunk to fit comprehension. There are no obvious clues that the scale is awry - this perfect England of the imagination has an air of menace.
Copenhagen International Documentary Festival New Visions. 2010
Mancunia 2020 32 min
(with Michael Symmons Roberts)
Mancunia is a haunting 30 minute film based around Michael Symmons Roberts’s acclaimed published poetry cycle about the myths of Manchester, with images by artist Steve Hawley, drawn from a century of film of the city from the North West Film Archive. Mancunia as a mythical city - a contemporary reimagining of the city symphony films of the 1920s.
Amen ICA Cinema 2002 10 min
Amen ICA Cinema is a palindromic video, completed on a palindromic date -the 20th February 2002. These palindromes are magic spells, things absurd yet logical and symmetrical. In the film a man and a woman are condemned to go over incidents in their relationship, backwards and forwards, endlessly. Even their very speech is reversed. Award- most innovative video, Vancouver Videpoem Festival 2002
Athens video poetry festival 2020, HOME Manchester 2020
Sonar Festival Barcelona 2003
Second Link touring video exhibition, MoMA New York, 1984
We Have Fun Drawing Conclusions 1982 7 min
In the permanent collection of Fundacio La Caixa , Barcelona
Language Lessons 1994 (with Tony Steyger) 35 min
"Steve Hawley sets words and images more pointedly against each other, so each questions the status and veracity of the other. His early works, mostly shot on video, included the nicely subversive We Have Fun Drawing Conclusions (1982), based on the then-standard Ladybird children's books, that undermined their unrealistically optimistic and stereotype-reinforcing images and texts with a subtly rewritten story in voice-over." (David Curtis)
Experimental documentary on artificial anguages commissioned by Channel 4 and the Arts Council. "Language Lessons mock-documents the scholars and enthusiasts for avant-languages such as Volapuk, Esperanto, and Sol Re Sol (a musically-based language). These invented languages reference concrete or sound poetry and the beauty of sonics unintended for literal communication" (Andrew James Paterson)
Ghost 1998 5:22
Ghost was made in Hong Kong just after the handover from Britain to China, when I was artist in residence at the Microwave Video festival. Gweilo, or ghost, is the Cantonese term of abuse for the paler skinned westerners who appeared to the Chinese of the Middle Kingdom to be like ghosts. I made this film in Hong Kong overlooking the old Kai Tak airport, just after the handover from the UK. The collisions of scale were vast, and I felt like a ghost myself in Hong Kong, a place where even History itself was put in a museum.
Director's Fortnight,Cannes Film Festival 2000.
A Proposition is a Picture 1992 23 min
'A Proposition is ...'is about the dislocation between words and images, filtered through an intense family history in which a son looks for clues to the whereabouts of his absent language-obsessed father, thereby creating new resonances for himself and the audience from fragments of Esperanto and the selection of chintzy touristic views. Ed Mayer's droll narration brings out the idiosyncratic intelligence of the piece...'. (Trevor Johnston)
London Film Festival 1992.National Film Theatre 1995
BIO
CONTACT
Email: stevehawley1@outlook.com
Steve Hawley is an artist who has been working with film and video since 1981, and his work has been shown at video festivals and broadcast worldwide since then. His video (with Tony Stegyer) The Science Mix was shown at the Stedelijk and MoMA NY in 1983, the first international touring show of video art. His original preoccupation was with language and image, and in 1995 his experimental documentary made with Tony Steyger on artificial languages was broadcast on Channel 4 TV.
His work on the city and myth includes Ghost made in Hong Kong, which was screened at the 2000 Cannes Director's Fortnight, and Manchester Time Machine 2012. This was made with the North West Film Archive is the first ever iPhone app to combine archive film footage and GPS. Other works looking at the nature of the city include Not to Scale 2009 (filmed in a series of deserted model villages).
He has explored issues around the impact of new technologies on narrative. Yarn 2011, uses the DVD medium to create a never ending story, and Actor 2013 makes film without a camera by putting the performer in a motion capture suit.
His work with the Archive has also included War Memorial 2017 which was nominated for best short documentary at the Sheffield DocFest, and Mancunia with poet Michael Symmons Roberts premiered at HOME Manchester in 2020, and screened in 2021 at the Athens Poetry Film Festival.
His book, Men, War and Film, about the unique Calling Blighty message films of WWII was published by Intellect in 2022.
His full length documentary about his friend, the black historian Mark Hutchinson, A Life as History, was premiered at the Void cinema in Sheffield Oct 24. Midville, with Steve Dutton 2025 was commissioned by the Fluxus Museum prize for experimental video 2025.
He is currently completing a new film/performance work, Broken English-spominjski ključi to released 2025.
He lives between Manchester UK and Ljubljana, Slovenia