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Nathaniel Mellors, Solo Exhibition

This solo exhibition at Baltimore Museum of Art was the first presentation of my work at a U.S. museum. The exhibition featured, for the first time, a new combination of Episode One (2010) from my video series 'Ourhouse' with ‘The Saprophage’. ‘The Saprophage’ is a video from a script I wrote in 2012 partly inspired by Pier-Paolo Pasolini’s unrealised film-script ‘St. Paul’, the basic scenario of which is about a modern St. Paul attempting to bring spirituality to the USA. ‘The Saprophage’ involves a dialogue between two main characters “Shemihaza The Nephilim’ (Gwendoline Christie) and ‘Terry’ (Johnny Vivash) who believe they are the sole-survivors of a ‘cultural apocalypse’. Within this ‘post-apocalyptic’ landscape, in which there is no longer any possibility of a future or past, they have a conversation describing an “apocalypse of history” and culture. The ‘Shemihaza’ character in ‘The Saprophage’ is filmed speaking from the hills of Los Angeles, while Terry is in East London, but the suggestion is that they are somehow inhabiting the same landscape. Perhaps the landscape is cultural, or economic. They are then surprised to be interrupted by a third character ‘Paul the Saprophage’ (David Birkin, filmed at St. Paul’s Bay, Lindos, Rhodes, Greece) who is a kind of profane saint, he is saprophagic, living from decaying, rotting matter, (I wanted to begin to write in an ecological theme) but is keen to find ‘America’. Shemihaza and Terry are suspicious of Paul and claim to have no idea where this ‘America’ is.

The Saprophage is an experimental work in terms of its script and its filming, being shot on iPhone using special lenses. This offers a liberated, dynamic camera-work, which felt appropriate for the works reflections on some kind of ‘consumer-digital’ environment. Sections of the video are ‘data-mashed’, the digital code is deliberately corrupted.