installation:three large scale mirrors, molton stage curtain, fireplace, video: 15 mins, HD DVCPro
actors:
Mansel David, Igor Guelman-Zak, Lyndsey Housden, Alison Mackenzie, Eun-Jung Lee, Christer Lundahl, Michael Mosol
Presented by The Artists’ Studio by Shezad DawoodWorking with a group of actors/performers in the Artists' Studio apartment in a specifically designed set, Szuper Gallery have divided the lower space into a dark mirrored studio/living space and the upper space into a light gallery. The video evolves as the performers move through and inhabit the plush Knightsbridge location. They are rehearsing an interview, focusing on the context of the space, Szuper Gallery's history as a commercial gallery and its alleged relations to the Post-Soviet Mafia
The video performance deconstructs the process of performing an act; concentrating on entrances, rehearsals, documentation, the set, the mechanics of the space, repetition and looping, re-enactment, awkwardness and delay. With an emphasis on notions of time and how artistic practice and experience is constructed.
"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
video stills, Work/Arbeit/Rabota, 2007
Work/Arbeit/Rabota, digital c-print, 2007
© Szuper Gallery 2022 — London, Munich, Uzhhorod