Artist Film Festival at Art Week Exeter

Exeter Artist Film Festival at Art Week Exeter brought the moving image into a public art context, presenting the BF Artist Film Festival back-catalogue as a single continuous programme. For the duration of the event, the whole collection of artist films was screened together for the first time, allowing audiences to move through years of festival selections in one sitting rather than edition by edition. The programming spanned experimental video, narrative shorts, documentary work, essay film, animation and collage, reflecting the breadth of practice the festival has supported across early and mid-career artists working nationally and internationally.

The screenings took place at a gallery-style venue on Paris Street in Exeter, with doors opening in the morning and running through the afternoon until early evening. A rolling daily schedule meant visitors could drop in at any point, whether they had planned a full day of viewing or an hour between other Art Week commitments. The format treated the back-catalogue as a shared resource for the city: an open, unhurried space in which moving-image work could be encountered alongside the wider programme of contemporary art and culture taking place across Exeter during the week.

Admission was free and open to everyone, a principle consistent with the festival's role as an accessible platform for artists and audiences. Free entry lowers practical barriers for students, local residents, gallery staff and casual passers-by, many of whom might never seek out a dedicated film festival. It also invites a different kind of attention than a ticketed session, one that encourages conversation, discussion and the slow accumulation of responses across a long programme of shorts.

Presenting the archive in this way also serves the artists whose work is held there. A back-catalogue is only meaningful if it reaches an audience, and showing every selected film together gives each work a context that a single edition cannot provide. Viewers encountering unfamiliar names and approaches side by side can read connections between practices, noticing recurring questions about space, time, image and voice across otherwise distinct screenings. For emerging and established artists, that kind of adjacency is a form of critical context, a curatorial argument assembled by the festival's accumulated selections over time.

The event illustrates how festival programmes can extend beyond their original runtimes and venues. Rather than remaining in an archive, the collection travelled to a new city and a new audience during a well-known cultural week, generating fresh interest in experimental moving-image work in the South West. For the festival, such collaborations demonstrate the value of partnerships with gallery spaces and local cultural organisations; for Exeter, they offered a substantial film programme that complemented and enlarged the wider Art Week offering. The result was a public demonstration of how artist film can be shared, discussed and sustained as part of a living arts culture.