Tinworks is pleased to present Fatal Act, a group of films by artist collective 13BC, that moves through the wreckage of nuclear history, Hollywood reproduction, and the gaps between an event and its copy.

Founded by curator Vic Brooks, artist Lucy Raven and writer/theorist Evan Calder Williams, 13BC is a research and production collective for moving images. The collective makes films and installations that explore hidden histories, archives, landscapes, and the political uses of technology.

Fatal Act is composed of four moving works— Straight Flush, Act I, When Horses Were Coconuts, and Corpse Cleaner. Straight Flush (2019, 72 min) takes shape around a film that was never made: Bob Hope's proposed biopic of Claude Eatherly, the military weather pilot whose report enabled the bombing of Hiroshima, and whose postwar unraveling became a contested public narrative of guilt, madness, and fraud. Shot in the barracks of the decommissioned Wendover Air Force base in Utah, the film follows Lily Gladstone, Bill Sage, and Dana Wheeler-Nicholson as they rehearse and revise a screenplay, killing time, gambling, and reading aloud while the sounds of live military exercises bleed into the space. In Act I (2019, silent loop) the moon rises over the barracks, with the resulting shot passing from dusk to day, day to night, and back to dusk, in a relentless loop of a process usually hidden between takes.

Corpse Cleaner (2016/2019, 18 min) leaves the barracks and descends into the crowded aisles of a working prop house, where Wheeler-Nicholson picks up loose threads from Straight Flush, composing letters back to the philosopher Günther Anders and tracing the logic of replicas, stand-ins, and fake German towns built to be bombed in the desert.

When Horses Were Coconuts (2019, 7 min) displaces the image of the bomb entirely: filmed at a waterfall in upstate New York and flipped 180 degrees, the footage becomes a strange proxy for the most iconic explosion of the twentieth century, recalling the Foley artist who fabricated the sound of the first televised atomic test from a recording of an African waterfall played backwards.

Together, the four films pull apart the images, sounds, and scripts that shaped the public memory of nuclear destruction, refusing to reproduce them cleanly.

Film viewing is free to all.

Viewing hours

Thursdays & Fridays, 6–9 pm · Saturdays, 2–5 pm

SCREENING DATES

MAY Thu 7 · Sat 9 · Thu 14 · Fri 15 · Sat 16 (session ends at 3pm for private rental) · Thu 21 · Fri 22 · Sat 23 · Thu 28 · Fri 29 · Sat 30

JUNE Thu 4 · Fri 5 · Sat 6 · Sat 13 (closing day)