On the occasion of Hyde Park Picture House’s 110th birthday, Pavilion and the cinema are delighted to present Memory Picture Palace House, a new film by Canadian artist Kasper Feyrer.

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.

Kasper Feyrer’s new film commission, Memory Picture Palace House, is presented alongside a selection of the artist’s previous works, including the first UK screening of O’On (2023).

Feyrer uses the 16mm camera as an “extension of the human sensorium,” creating films that serve as “devices through which one can feel time and mirror perception, expanding one’s embodied experience of the world.”

Films will be projected both digitally and on 16mm, with readings interspersed between selected works.

Films