CITRIC is pleased to present Karin Kihlberg & Reuben Henry’s solo show at the gallery. The show hosts a number of new works in video, a series of drawings and a sound installation, each questioning the value of liveness and live performance in a society saturated with media representations.
Performance #1, #2 & #3 (2007-08) is a triptych of videos of performances in galleries in Prague, Manchester and Umeå. Unlike performance documents that purport to some documentary truth, these short videos are manipulated with editing and sound effects, and were made in live performances engineered towards creating subversions of this ‘truth’. At each live act the artists told the audience "We are going to play the part of the artists, and you will play the part of the audience", before directing a video of an invented performance, controlling the events and the audience as directed by a film storyboard. By implying this position of acting for the camera, the status of the live performance is altered to function only for the purpose of its media reproduction. This can be seen as a reflection of performance art in general as well as of a whole spectrum of cultural activity where the document of the event can seem more important than the event itself.
Acting Dead (2008) is a series of portrait drawings of actors playing dead in movies. Removed from the filmic system of cause and effect, and from the cinematographic framing and movement in which we usually consume such imagery, these drawings shift our experience of filmic death into an altered currency of cultural consumption. In The Third Meaning Roland Barthes argues that the filmic “cannot be grasped in the film, “in situation”, “in movement”, “in its natural state”, but only in that major artefact, the still.” Acting Dead makes a further contextual shift, away from cinematic imagery altogether, allowing us to consider the myriad representations of death in film from an alternate perspective.
Of the other works in the show, it is The Editors Intervention (2008) that commands the entire space. Intermittently, the airwaves are filled with the sound of a passing train. The piece is inspired by a scene from The Godfather, where the sound of passing trains was inserted by the editor in post production as a method of adding tension, despite the lacking evidence of a railway in the films visuals. By using the same editorial technique at CITRIC, Kihlberg & Henry take reality through a cinematic post-production process, implying the possibility of directorial control over everyday experience.
Through these works, the artists present an ecstatic kind of truth, shifting between making reality more fictional and fiction more real.
Biographic note:
Karin Kihlberg (Sweden) & Reuben Henry (England) are based in Birmingham, UK, and have been collaborating since 2004. They are making a new performance at Zoo Art Fair In October 2008 with Collecting Live Art. Recent solo exhibitions include Verkligheten in Umeå, Sweden, Les Mois de la Photo at SKOL in Montréal, and Castlefield Gallery in Manchester. Recent group exhibitions include Art Futures at Bloomberg Space, 100 Ideas Festival at Hayward Gallery, Art Summer University at Tate Modern and the Next Wave Festival in Melbourne. They have worked on residencies at Red Gate Gallery in Beijing, Futura in Prague and at The New Art Gallery Walsall, UK.
In 2009 they will be researchers at the Jan Van Eyck Academie, Maastricht.
About their work:
Kihlberg & Henry utilise the intense structuring of industrial cinema to create complex relationships between our experiences of life and moving image. Often their video works are created in live and performative settings, with video acting as a mechanism to record, and drastically alter, the processes in which it was made. In other works they abandon video altogether in order to use the structure and function of cinema in unconventional ways by re-applying it to new situations and interventions.