This deeply exploratory work is drawn exclusively from the eclectic personal and public archive, in multiple formats, of Andrea’s life until their lasting estrangement from both parents, aged 30.
Alternating between the playful, poetic and unsettling, While the Gods… collages together photographs, 16mm, VHS, interviews and diary entries in a process of profound and necessary self – and social interrogation.
Andrea Luka Zimmerman is a Jarman Award-winning artist and filmmaker. Andrea’s multilayered practice has been described as Intuitive Cinema. It embodies and explores fragile refusals and counter memories, and itinerant lives, human and otherwise, in relation to structural and political injustice. Andrea’s films include: Taskafa, Stories of the Street (2013, written and voiced by the late John Berger), Estate, a Reverie (2015), Erase and Forget (2017), Artangel-produced Here for Life (2019) and The Wapping Project-produced Wayfaring Stranger (2024, featuring Eileen Myles), which have screened widely around the world including at Locarno, IDFA, Istanbul, Berlin, BAFICI and IFFR festivals, as well as in cinemas, galleries, and community and activist spaces.
Selected exhibitions include ’The Child Within us All’, Arnolfini, ‘Shelter in Place’, SAW, and Estuary Festival, ‘Civil Rites’, the London Open at Whitechapel Gallery, solo exhibitions ‘Common Ground’ at Spike Island, and ‘Real Estates’ at Peer Gallery.
Selected writing includes extended essays in ‘Brick’, ‘Strangers Within: Documentary as Encounter’, ‘Open Democracy’, (among others) and co-editing the books ‘Estate: Art, Politics and Social Housing in Britain’ (Myrdle Court Press) and ‘Doorways: Women, Homelessness Trauma and Resistance’ (House Sparrow Press).
Andrea’s films are held in the BFI National Film Archive and the Arts Council England Collection, and are distributed by LUX, Modern Films and Grasshopper Films. A 2 disk Blu-ray, Fugitive Images: Selected Works by Andrea Luka Zimmerman, was released by Second Run.
