Output details

'Four Characters in Search of a Performance' For the exhibition 'LOCATE' commissioned by Jerwood Visual Arts for Jerwood Space, London, 2010

In response to a research brief on the concept of ‘site’, I was selected by Sarah Williams, curator at the Jerwood Space to develop a new work over a 5-month period for a 3-person exhibition. The piece continues my explorations into the territory between the real experience of live art and performance, and how documentation, interpretation and language inform a viewer’s experience and understanding of an event after it has occurred. It sought to interrogate the ways that narratives fictionalize performance and reflected upon the nature of looking and interpretation. Taking Luigi Pirandello's 'Six Characters in Search of an Author' as a formal cue, the piece is a self-reflexive drama that insists on its own artifice from the outset.

The result is a film-based 4-screen installation based on a fictional performance artwork reconstructed through 4 narratives: these wildly contradictory eyewitness accounts are delivered by actors filmed stylistically to reference documentary, but employing lurid colours and ‘stagey’ make up and wigs. The resulting account of the fictional work is clearly inaccurate, unrepresentative and skewed towards the interest of whoever is telling the story. The research and devising process adopted an interrogative approach to the contested status of performance art documentation and its historical assimilation, incorporating theatrical writing, rehearsal and production methodologies.

Awarded Jerwood grant of £2500, and an ACE grant of £2500

Exhibition information, downloadable catalogue and press release: http://jerwoodvisualarts.org/3096/Jerwood-Encounters-Locate/226