VIDEOS

 

Scottish duo, The Bird And The Monkey (Sarahjane Swan and Roger Simian), began collaborating around 2009 on low budget DIY promotional music videos to accompany their own songs.

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One early music video, "Do You Wanna?", was picked by the BBC Music Video Festival in 2011 with open-air screenings on Edinburgh Big Screen in Festival Square.

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As well as continuing to create alternative songs and promotional videos as The Bird And The Monkey, Swan and Simian began making short films, installations and other interdisciplinary artworks from 2012, eventually taking on the name Avant Kinema for these ventures. Most of their films rely heavily on music. Several - including "Flow State", "SuperFly Super 8 circa Nineteen Seventy-Seven" and "Anna of my Seventy-Two Senses" - could be classed as experimental music videos.

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Over the years films and music videos by Swan and Simian have screened internationally - throughout the UK, Europe, Scandinavia, the USA, Canada, Latin America, Australia and New Zealand - including an exhibition at the Royal Scottish Academy and airings on several episodes of the American experimental cable access show, Here Comes Everybody, which broadcasts across numerous US states.

 

Sarahjane Swan and Roger Simian have received arts grants and commissions from South of Scotland VACMA, the Hope Scott Trust, Creative Scotland and Imprints of the New Modernist Editing. They were the 2019 winners of the Pauline Fay Lazarus prize for work using the human form and have also been shortlisted for the EIFF Short Film Challenge (2016), and nominated for the Margaret Tate Award (2018).