Memory Picture Palace House

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Shot on 16mm during HPPH’s recent restoration, the 37-minute film wrestles with the venue’s porous history, its physical footprint in an inner suburb of Leeds, and the city’s role in the cultural epoch sparked by the invention of moving image technology in the late 19th century.

Part reverie, part living tribute, Memory Picture Palace House traces a path through a building where experience and memory are continually transformed by the daily projection of films.

A hand feels its way around the construction site; a finger traces the same path on the original vellum plans of the building, while fleeting allusions are made to sites of absence across the city: former cinemas, a factory that once made movie projectors, Victorian recreational gardens, and locations tied to the cultural life of Louis Le Prince, Leeds' likely inventor of cinema.

Alongside the images, a call-and-response soundtrack unfolds. The artist uses the building as a memory palace to recite by heart a poem composed for the film by a group of Leeds artists. Their words—like the plants seen growing in cracks—shape a new, entangled ecology within the work.

For this inaugural presentation, we are pleased to be joined in person by Kasper Feyrer, who will discuss their new film in conversation with writer and art historian James Boaden.