2000-2010
Dialogue #1 (Let’s begin again)
Video loop, 1999
Actors: Ruth Maclennan and Robin Banerji
A looping performance where there is no beginning and no end. It draws on the uncanny but ordinary experience of ‘having been here before’.
In Dialogue #2 (We need to talk about the future)
video loop, 2000
Actors: Selina Maclennan and Simon Scardifield
A young man and an older woman swap roles as they take it in turns to fire each other, without ever reaching a conclusion.
Dialogue #3 (That’s not for me to say)
Video, 12 minutes, 2002
Actor: Ian Kelly
Filmed during my Leverhulme residency in the archives of the London School of Economics, this film depicts an enclosed but unstable world. Across the globe, many features of the corporate workplace have found their way into numerous other walks of life. Although suggesting narrative progression, Dialogue #3 (That’s not for me to say) is prevented from unfolding. The dialogue echoes a range of other forms including Beckett, courtroom drama, corporate training videos and artists’ video loops.
Dialogue #4 (What is your culture?)
two-channel video projection, 12 minutes, 2005
Actor: Paul Hill
The protagonist speaks a language of the workplace, in which meanings are always deferred. His gestures and words seem to belong to a past or future moment from which he is irrevocably severed, but which he rehearses over and over again, blind to his surroundings. Meanwhile, each room, door, and corridor flickers with the shadows of past and future occupants and occupations. Filmed during my State of Mind residency with the BIOS Research Centre at LSE.
Dialogue #5 (It’s not your problem)
2009-2010, 19 min
Actor: Paul Chahidi
A man undergoes a personal crisis in response to the current financial, climatic, economic crises that he is tuning into in the media and his surroundings. This was first installed in the disused office in which it was filmed.