Morgan Quaintance is a London-based artist and writer.
Born on the premises of St Thomas’ Hospital in 1979, not in earshot of the bow bells, but still an incontrovertible South Londoner, Quaintance avoided early gang affiliations, death, borstal and the crushing passive aggression of the English bourgeosie, to rise through the more perilous ranks of the UK art world in the 2010s. Refusing institutional affiliations for the more ’noble’ territory of near obscure precarity, Quaintance has embraced the margins by choice and necessity, but could “do with some cash and a kind word”.
His moving image work has been shown and exhibited widely at festivals and institutions including: MOMA, New York; Konsthall C, Sweden; David Dale, Glasgow; European Media Art Festival, Germany; Images Festival, Toronto; International Film Festival Rotterdam; and Third Horizon Film Festival, Miami.
His practice remains responsive to contemporary experience and so largely eschews the rehearsal of set themes. However, interests in the human condition, the cultic milieu, counterculture, ethnography, the built environment, Afro-Caribbean, African American, East Asian and British histories are all mainstays.
He is the recipient of the 2025 Jarman Award. He was a 2024 MacDowell Fellow. He was the 2023 IFFR Short Film Nominee for the European Film Awards; the recipient of the 2022 ARTE Award at Kurzfilm Festival Hamburg; in 2021, the Best Documentary Short Film Award at Tacoma Film Festival, USA; the Explora Award at Curtocircuito International Film Festival, Santiago de Compostela; the UK Short Film Award at Open City Documentary Film Festival, London, the Jean Vigo Prize for Best Director at Punto de Vista, Spain, and the Best Experimental Film Award at Curtas Vila do Conde, Portugal; in 2020, the New Vision Award atCPH:DOX, Denmark and the Best Experimental Film award at Curtas Vila Do Conde, Portugal .
Over the past fourteen years, his critically incisive writings on contemporary art, aesthetics and their socio-political contexts have featured in publications including Art Monthly, the Wire, the Guardian, numerous others that it’ll be too boring to list here, and helped shape and influence the UK’s new landscape of progressive cultural discourse and debate. A key reference here is his 2017 text The New Conservatism: Complicity and the UK Art World’s Performance of Progression, available via the main page.
‘汾阳的喧嚣: Ironic Resonance, Anti-sound Design and Radical Cacophony in Jia Zhangke’s 小 Xiao 武 Wu’ (2024) is Quaintance’s first book. It is available to purchase here.
From 2012 – 2023 he was the producer and presenter of Studio Visit, an interview-based, broadcast radio programme for London’s Resonance 104.4FM. The post-broadcast archive of over 100 interviews can be found here, and includes in depth conversations with Carolee Schneemann, Kevin Jerome Everson, Jimmie Durham, Susan Hiller, Jean Fisher, Andrea Fraser, Kathleen Daniel and Billy Woodberry.
Quaintance’s films are distributed by LUX, London.
Contact: distribution@lux.org.uk
To leave a personal message/disabuse/hurl abuse/pour scorn, call: 0203 287 3773
Seeikokan III (2025) Installation view, John Hansard Gallery
Morgan // Quaintance // ----------- 