Work/Arbeit/Rabota, 2007
installation:three large scale mirrors, molton stage curtain, fireplace, video: 15 mins, HD DVCPro
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perfomers:
Mansel David, Igor Guelman-Zak, Lyndsey Housden, Alison Mackenzie, Eun-Jung Lee, Christer Lundahl, Michael Mosol
Shezad Dawood invited us to collaborate on staging an artist studio in a residential apartment in London’s Knightsbridge. We decided to transform the apartment into a recording studio, further exploring the theme of storytelling. Working with a group of artist friends as performers, all of whom had personal histories of immigration to London (from Russia, Ukraine, South Korea, Sweden, and Wales), we performed Arbeit/Rabota.
For the exhibition, we divided the apartment: the lower level became a dark, mirrored studio/living space, while the upper level was configured as a light-filled gallery. The video evolves as the performers navigate and inhabit the plush Knightsbridge setting, rehearsing for an interview that deconstructs the very process of performing. The focus shifted to entrances, rehearsals, the documentation process, the set, and the mechanics of the space—highlighting repetition, looping, re-enactment, awkwardness, and delay. The work emphasized notions of time and how artistic practice and experience are constructed, calling attention to the often unseen labor behind the scenes
“In the video recorded in a single 15-minute take and titled Work/Arbeit/Rabota, seven people of various ages, races and dispositions wander around the blacked-out room, followed by the camera and its operator, both occasionally visible within the mirrors, an autocue positioned above the lens feeding the stalked participant their lines, When the camera closes in on someonem he or show speaks directly to it: "I had this dream. I was superman and my father was a clairvoyant," utters a young blonde woman. Others talk of revolution, of the economic system, or ask, "What is the work? We bought some work, we made some work." Individuals and utterances are by these methods and devices, divorced and dislocated; we know the actors lines have been chosen for them. This crude ventriloquism takes a further twist when one discovers that the script was assembled from interviews the members of Szuper Gallery (Susanne Clausen and Pawlo Kerestey) carried out with each other, and that the people in the video stand in, in some not entirely clarified manner for the artists at an earlier stage of their by now extensive, somewhat variegated artistic practice."
Peter Suchin
︎Peter Suchin: ArtReview
︎Jessica Lack : Guardian Guide
︎Laura K Jones: Saatchi Gallery website
︎Slashseconds issue 5
installation:three large scale mirrors, molton stage curtain, fireplace, video: 15 mins, HD DVCPro
perfomers:
Mansel David, Igor Guelman-Zak, Lyndsey Housden, Alison Mackenzie, Eun-Jung Lee, Christer Lundahl, Michael Mosol
Shezad Dawood invited us to collaborate on staging an artist studio in a residential apartment in London’s Knightsbridge. We decided to transform the apartment into a recording studio, further exploring the theme of storytelling. Working with a group of artist friends as performers, all of whom had personal histories of immigration to London (from Russia, Ukraine, South Korea, Sweden, and Wales), we performed Arbeit/Rabota.
For the exhibition, we divided the apartment: the lower level became a dark, mirrored studio/living space, while the upper level was configured as a light-filled gallery. The video evolves as the performers navigate and inhabit the plush Knightsbridge setting, rehearsing for an interview that deconstructs the very process of performing. The focus shifted to entrances, rehearsals, the documentation process, the set, and the mechanics of the space—highlighting repetition, looping, re-enactment, awkwardness, and delay. The work emphasized notions of time and how artistic practice and experience are constructed, calling attention to the often unseen labor behind the scenes
“In the video recorded in a single 15-minute take and titled Work/Arbeit/Rabota, seven people of various ages, races and dispositions wander around the blacked-out room, followed by the camera and its operator, both occasionally visible within the mirrors, an autocue positioned above the lens feeding the stalked participant their lines, When the camera closes in on someonem he or show speaks directly to it: "I had this dream. I was superman and my father was a clairvoyant," utters a young blonde woman. Others talk of revolution, of the economic system, or ask, "What is the work? We bought some work, we made some work." Individuals and utterances are by these methods and devices, divorced and dislocated; we know the actors lines have been chosen for them. This crude ventriloquism takes a further twist when one discovers that the script was assembled from interviews the members of Szuper Gallery (Susanne Clausen and Pawlo Kerestey) carried out with each other, and that the people in the video stand in, in some not entirely clarified manner for the artists at an earlier stage of their by now extensive, somewhat variegated artistic practice."
Peter Suchin
︎Peter Suchin: ArtReview
︎Jessica Lack : Guardian Guide
︎Laura K Jones: Saatchi Gallery website
︎Slashseconds issue 5
