Another Decade
Morgan Quaintance 

HALLE FÜR KUNST Steiermark presents the work Another Decade (2018) by London-based artist and writer Morgan Quaintance.

Another Decade combines archival and found footage from the 1990s with a newly shot 16mm film and standard definition video. The film focuses on statements made by artists, theorists, and cultural producers at a conference held by the Institute of International Visual Arts, London, in 1994. Quaintance observed that many of the participants from that time have not lost their influence two decades later. This fact evokes the sense that very little is changing in Britain on a socio-cultural or institutional level. The film alternates between the actors of the art world and the lived experiences of London’s multi-ethnic population, expressing a dynamic tension that undermines asserted truths.

While recent attention to the 1990s has cast a largely apolitical and monocultural gaze on the decade, the work seeks to unearth in the ​“shallow grave of cultural amnesia” hints of a different, more political, iconoclastic, and confrontational decade that promised a future that has yet to arrive.


Morgan Quaintance (*1979 London, lives in London) is a London-based writer and artist, who works mainly with moving image. Over the past ten years he has been writing about contemporary art, aesthetics and their socio-political contexts. He is a regular contributor to Art Monthly, and has written for The Guardian and The Wire among others. His moving image work has been shown and exhibited widely at festivals and institutions including: MoMA, New York; McEvoy Foundation for the Arts, San Francisco; Konsthall C, Sweden; David Dale, Glasgow; European Media Art Festival, Osnabrück; Alchemy Film and Arts Festival, Scotland; Images Festival, Toronto; International Film Festival Rotterdam and Third Horizon Film Festival, Miami. Quaintance was awarded the 2021 Jean Vigo Award for Best Director at Punto de Vista film festival, Spain.