Output details
34 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
University of Reading : A - Art
‘WE’. Incorporating a performance and film. First staged at Kunsthall Oslo; The Royal Standard, Liverpool (part of the Liverpool Biennial); ICA, London; and Tate Online (screening of film of performance). Subsequently re-performed at Limoncello, London; King Kong Klub, Berlin; Bethnal Green Working Men’s Club, London; C.A.M.P., London; Hackney Wicked, London; Awangarda Gallery, Wroclaw; ASC Gallery, London; The Old Police Station, London; Andor Gallery, London; LUPA, London; Bruno Glint Gallery, London; LGP, Coventry; Primary, Nottingham; and Glass Factory, London.
‘WE’ is a live performance, written and directed by Pil and Galia Kollectiv, featuring the artists playing live music with Victor M. Jakeman, Ruth Angel Edwards and Emily Rachel Beber. It was performed at prestigious venues in the UK and Europe, including the Kunsthall, Oslo (29.08.10), the Royal Standard, Liverpool (as part of the Liverpool Biennial 17.09.10) and the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London (08.04.11). A film of the event was screened on Tate Online (from August 2011).
‘WE’ comprises a group of four performers in a Perspex stage set, wearing matching costumes and Perspex boxes. The group sing and play minimal synth cover versions of pop songs in which the personal pronoun singular is replaced by the plural. The project investigates the latent politics of the love song and the construction of its liberal subject. Songs about ‘me’ and ‘you’ become songs about ‘us’; intimacy becomes a form of collective action and the unique becomes universal. Despite being the mass product of an anonymous culture industry, the premise of the pop song is one of extreme individualism, elevating the ‘one’ subject of romantic desire above any other and declaring one moment in time (‘when I first saw you’) more significant than any other. As a result, even though the pop song is often the outcome of the labour of producers, engineers and technicians, it is associated with the strong fictional character of the pop star. ‘WE’ re-injects collectivity into this framework, exploring the tension between the dystopian quality of the totalitarian mass and the utopian promise of a communal project. By using the format of a pop group rather than the conventions of performance art, ‘WE’ operates across galleries and music venues.
The project was funded by Kunsthall, Oslo, ICA, London, Tate Britain and The Royal Standard, Liverpool.
