Professor Andrew Kötting is our Professor of Time Based Media at UCA Canterbury. He was born in Elmstead Woods, England and went on to become an intermittent lumberjack in the French Pyrenees. 

He trained for an MA at the Slade School of Fine Art in London specialising in performance and film. In 1989 he collaborated with Leila McMillan in setting up Badbloodandsibyl. He directed numerous experimental short films and performed across the UK and Europe. He has been awarded prizes at international film festivals and won commissions from the BBC, Channel 4 and The Arts Council. He also produces bookworks, CDs, LPs installations and paintings, many in collaboration with his daughter Eden.

“Andrew Kotting…has been making films for a long time. But are his films,… even films at all? Or are they by-products, documenting other processes, their purpose known only to the artist himself? …. To me the film Gallivant seemed immediately one of the greatest things any human being had ever made …. We spend a lot of time peering over our shoulders at the artists we’ve lost, forgetting that, if we look for them, some of the greatest are amongst us now.”
Stewart Lee Sight & Sound Nov 2015

Professor Kötting’s work moves from live-art inflected, often absurdist performance pieces (corrupted by their own internal logics and skewed mythologies), through to film and video works.

He takes landscape and journeys as springboards for autobiographical enquiries into identity, belonging, history and place. He is interested in teasing out both the ‘melancholy’ and the ‘dada’ in contemporary culture.

Professor Kötting has a wide range of formal interests but also refuses to adopt conventional ideas of closure around artworks in any medium and therefore embraces the notions of ‘spillage’ from one discipline into another. Ideas and images frequently migrate between media, echoing and amplifying this spillage.

Throughout his practice he has produced bookworks and created for digital and animation platforms as well as for the gallery and installation. He also continues to work in collaboration with his disabled daughter Eden.

His feature films have been distributed throughout the UK by Film Four, BFI, Artificial Eye, Soda Pictures and HOME, in France by ED Distribution, in Switzerland by Box Productions and in Japan by Group Gendai Films. His short films and single screen video works are also distributed throughout the UK, France and Switzerland and have been acquired by the Arts Council and the Centre Pompidou for their respective collections.

He has been commissioned to make multi-media art projects including: ‘Mapping Perception‘, commissioned by the Welcome Trust and Proboscis and ‘In The Wake of a Deadad‘, a research project produced through the UCA and an AHRC fellowship.

‘Swandown’ (Ordnance and Surveying) was initially commissioned as a Bookwork through the CCI and UCA and eventually went on to become a series of live art performances and a feature film funded by The Film Council. It was made in collaboration with the writer Iain Sinclair and was shown extensively in cinemas across the UK and as an installation at Dilston Grove.

He again collaborated with Iain Sinclair on ‘By Our Selves’, part funded by a Kickstarter campaign and The Arts Council of England manifest as a series of installations, performances and a feature film, distributed throughout the UK and Ireland by Soda Pictures. The bookwork of the same name is distributed by the BFI.

In 2016 he produced ‘Edith Walks’, another series of installations, performances and a feature film distributed by HOME in Manchester, as well as Bookwork part funded by UCA and distributed by the BFI.

2018 saw the release of the final part of his ‘Earthworks Trilogy’; ‘Lek and the Dogs’, a feature film distributed by HOME throughout the UK and Ireland and as a bookwork through the BFI. In the spring of 2019 his feature film ‘The Whalebone Box’ was streamed through the online platform MUBI and in the autumn of 2019 INVADA records will release a double vinyl remix of the soundtrack to the film.

Most of his moving image work is available in the UK through the BFI, HOME or LUX.