Luke Fowler, 'Patrick', 2020 (film still). Courtesy of the artist and The Modern Institute/Toby Webster Ltd, Glasgow 

In spring 2026, artist, filmmaker and musician Luke Fowler will create a new sound commission for Outer Spaces. Fowler - whose films often interrogates the disjunction between sound and image - will develop a new installation making use of obsolete analogue technology. These apparatus were originally conceived for the transmission and reproduction of sound in domestic settings. The artist considers how this folklore of 20th century technology could be re-purposed to create a complex, auditory and sculptural landscape where phantasms of voice, noise, feedback and memory are conjured ephemerally in space.

Luke Fowler (b. 1978, Glasgow) lives and works in Glasgow. Fowler questions the style and political implications of conventional modes of documentary through a varied practice which encompasses film, sound, installation and photography. He is concerned with finding new ways to meaningfully engage with marginal cultural figures, spaces and archive materials through the medium of 16mm film. His moving image works have charted an alternative history of Britain as well as considering significant international musicians and artists – revisiting the work of Margaret Tait, R. D. Laing, Patrick Cowley, and Brunhild Ferrari, amongst others.

He was nominated for The Turner Prize in 2012 and received the inaugural Derek Jarman Award in

2008. In 2014, Fowler was one of the recipients of Artists and Archives: Artists’ Moving Image, a unique

residency programme based at BBC Scotland. In 2014, MACK published Fowler’s first monograph of

his photo archive. Fowler has exhibited and shown his films internationally. His film Mum’s Cards was

awarded the 2019 Scottish Short Film Award at Glasgow Short Film Festival and the prize for Best

Short at Punto de Vista International Documentary Film Festival of Navarre, Spain. In 2023, Being in a

Place: A Portrait of Margaret Tait was awarded the La Scam International Award at Cinéma du Réel.

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