The first LADA Screens of 2016 event is ‘And I’, a collaboration between artist and experimental filmmaker, Reynir Hutber, and many-storied artist and notorious orator, Marcia Farquhar. The film which will only be shown once at the White Building is a single-channel eight-hour video of Farquhar speaking without edits of sustained pauses. Her monologue, occasionally interrupted or prompted by Hutber, is improvised and entirely unrehearsed. At eight hours long, ‘And I’ is an act of endurance for the performers and, potentially, the audience who are free to leave and enter the gallery at will. The video, which is the length of a traditional working day raises the notion of thinking, speaking and remembering as forms of unacknowledged labour. The film runs for the full period of a galleries’ opening hours and can be played only once in any one location – despite being a document it has the temporary quality of a performance.
The work draws inspiration from playwright, Samuel Beckett, and artist/filmmaker, Andy Warhol, whose durational screen tests of celebrities and ‘superstars’ disturbed the division between a film and a photographic still. As the film evolves, the line between an artist interview and a performance for camera will be blurred as different ‘personas’ and ‘voices’ emerge. The relationship between memory and fantasy, as well as theatre and reality, may be called into question. The aim of this work is to evoke a, perhaps uncomfortable, space between interview, tutorial and performance, the tone oscillating between the mundane and the theatrical and the atmosphere shifting at times from sociable and humorous to personal, exhausting and obsessive. The epic monologue may stop being about communication and become, instead, about staving off silence.
Online Screening
To accompany the film and event at the White Building, LADA will be showing a short film called ‘Not And I’, online between 24 Feb and 9 March on the LADA Screens Channel. ‘Not And I’, is edited by Reynir Hutber and derived from the photographs, rehearsal footage and other documentation of this unique work of endurance.
The work is based on an original idea by Hutber and draws on the long-durational live works of Farquhar. The work was produced in partnership with the Live Art Development Agency and was supported using public funding by the National Lottery through Arts Council England.
Marcia Farquhar is known for her work in performance, installation, video and object making. Conceptual in nature, much of her practice revolves around the stories and interactions of everyday life, as well as the engineering of unexpected social interactions in which the distance between audience and performer is frequently breached. Her site-specific events have been staged and exhibited internationally in museums and galleries, as well as in cinemas, kitchen showrooms, pubs, parks and leisure centres.
Reynir Hutber is a London-based artist working across a range of mediums including live art, installation, sculpture and new media. A critical use of digital technology is often central to his practice, as is a desire to explore concerns around the authenticity and limitations of the document – particularly in relation to performance. Hutber has been engaged to develop and perform work across Europe, including events and exhibitions in Italy, Spain, Germany, Brussels and Sweden. In May 2010 he was awarded ‘The Catlin Art Prize’ in London, UK, and in March 2013 he was nominated for ‘Le Prix Cube’ In Paris. In 2014 he was awarded an ‘artist’s bursary’ for artists working in contemporary performance by Art’s Admin and, in 2015, he completed a residency at Chisenhale Art Place, London.
