Output details

Game Keepers Without Game

Game Keepers Without Game, developed directly from Wardill’s ‘Life is a Dream’ Serpentine Gallery, 2008, reinterprets the play ‘La Vida es Sueño’, 1635, Calderón de la Barca in the context of contemporary London.

Deliberately including the components of a cinematic/theatrical melodrama, it is a film narrative told as much through objects as actors. Shot against a white background, people and objects are treated as separate elements with rarely any contact between them (as if they are evidence to be studied). The distinction between theatrical ‘props’, ‘evidence’ in a criminal context, and ‘status symbols’ conveying lifestyle choice, is blurred to emphasize how meaning settles within material.

The film continues the research pursued through Wardill's earlier works, particularly ‘Sea Oak’ 2008 and its use of melodrama as a communication and structuring device that ‘frames’ ideas, the relationship between structural film making and contemporary politics, and the use of objects as signifiers. ‘Game Keepers Without Game’ extends this enquiry through Wardill's development of her own melodramatic structure to explore elements of contemporary British life, namely, status expressed through consumer choice, social mobility and class.

The work, distinctive as an early example of an artists’ feature-length film, won the 2011 Jarman Award. The £10,000 award and commission recognises “individual artist film-makers whose risk-taking work resists boundaries and conventional definition [and] encompasses innovation, excellence and vision”. ‘Game Keepers’ was first shown at the Basel Art Fair 2009 and subsequently as solo exhibitions at Spacex, Exeter 2009; The Showroom, London 2010; Altman Siegel Gallery, San Francisco 2010; Nassauischer Kunstverein Wiesbaden 2010. It has been included in numerous group exhibitions including The British Art Show 2010; Wardill was shortlisted for the Future Generations Art Prize, Kiev 2011.

The work has been discussed extensively, including articles in Frieze, 2007, 2010, 2012, Mute 2010, Artforum 2010 and Afterall 2011.