Press Release

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.

Press Release

Karin Kihlberg & Reuben Henry's first solo show in Sweden will open with Performance #3, which will be performed live in the gallery space together with audience members who will become an essential part of the work.

Working with video, performance and collaboration with audiences, Kihlberg & Henry create situations with an in-built mechanism to create videos that depict a significantly different scene from the performative situations in which they were created. Performance #3, which is the third part in a series of works where the documentation of the performance appears more important than the performance itself, illustrates this idea via a performance and its representation. An art performance has been meticulously planned in a film storyboard, and the artists will make a shot-for-shot rendition live in the gallery. While Kihlberg & Henry act as directors and camera operators, as well as playing the part of the artists, visitors to the performance play the part of the live audience. The video that results from the performance, which will be shown later in the gallery alongside Performance #1 and Performance #2, will be dubbed with studio sound effects, giving it realism in a filmic sense, yet theoretically distancing it from the raw liveness often associated with performance art.

Also showing is their video installation The Waiting Room (2006). The work was made during a residency at The New Art Gallery Walsall, UK, where the artists made a film set of an institutional waiting room and invited members of the public to star in a series of videos about the unavoidable circumstance of waiting. As well as the series of videos they produced, the installation includes a production video and the storyboards, linking the work back to its process of creation, again creating a stark contrast between the live situation and the heavily altered reality which they create on video.

Performance #3 is supported by Vivid
Exhibition supported by The British Council

Press Release

Karin Kihlberg & Reuben Henry propose experimental models for replaying and reinterpreting various scenarios. Their video installation, The Waiting Room (2006), transposes cinematic language into the context of real life situations. During a residency at The New Art Gallery Walsall, the artists transformed their studio into a movie set that replicates an anonymous waiting room. Visitors become involved with various bizarre interactions that could possibly happen as we spend our time, waiting to be called. In the performance, Within the Chaos there is CHNS (A Demonstration of the Classic Hollywood Narrative System) thriller is used as a musical score for an improvisation by Guitarist Bernard Falaise. Written by Karin Kihlberg & Reuben Henry, the script follows the pace of narrative suspense designed to keep viewers attention from beginning to end. As a critique of Hollywood narrative, this performance proposes a new audio version of the standard model.

Kihlberg & Henry use narrative and representational devices to variously explore the participatory dimensions of work that are often performative in nature. This is the case with The Waiting Room, which takes an absurdist approach to the vacuous experience of waiting. The Hitchcockian “McGuffin” becomes a vector for suspense and character interaction. The protagonists’ actions unveil territories and their flip side (what exists beyond the frame) to be interwoven with spaces that eschew the conventions of linear narrative. The artists are equally fascinated with performance, be it that of the audience (Columbia, 2003) or of a guitarist (as in Within the Chaos there is CHNS). In the latter, a film script literally serves as a score. Narrative owes everything to sequence, which represents events assingular relationships connecting cause and effect. Backtracking from effect to cause creates suspense, and there is still narrative with independent series of causes and effects, as in the complications of Sei Shonagon or Geoges Perec. When the machine runs amok, the direct link is broken and we have to retie the thread ourselves. Such strategies proliferate and intertwine in the work of Kihlberg & Henry.

Curated by Patrice Duhamel
CHNS performed by Bernard Falaise
Exhibition supported by The British Council

Show as part of Le Mois de la Photo a Montreal 2007 (curated by Marie Fraser)

Press Release

The exhibition is a coming together of works from 2003-2007, mostly from the artists collaborative practice, plus a new work that will be made during a performance in the gallery. This is typical of the way in which Kihlberg & Henry work; through performances and processes which have a built-in mechanism for recording the event and re-presenting it at a later date. This re-presentation is a central thread which runs through much of the work in the show, and several pieces will be exhibited for the first time in this format.

Kihlberg & Henry's work takes much of its influence from cinema. Using video, performance, and collaboration with audiences they use the components of cinema, be that actors, music, film structure and theory or filmic visualisations, to create new events and situations. While these situations challenge our perceptions and tighten the gap between film and real life, the works that result from them, often injected with filmic production values, are unrecognisable from the performance in which they were created.

The new work the artists will make during the exhibition is part of a series in which the documentation of the live act appears more important than the act itself. The artists will meticulously plan the performance in a film storyboard, and make a shot-for-shot video rendition in the gallery. While Kihlberg & Henry act as directors and camera operators, as well as playing the part of the artists, visitors to the gallery play the part of the audience, applauding or looking on in horror as requested. The video that results from the performance will be dubbed with studio sound effects, giving it realism in a filmic sense, yet distancing it from the raw liveness often associated with performance art.

The show came at the end of a two month residency with Futura, Prague, with a studio at Kalin Studios. You was a show with Jiri Cernicky, and took place at Futura and The Czech Centre, where the first of the Performance series was made during the opening.

Curated by Alberto di Stefano

During a residency with Red Gate Gallery, Beijing, we shot The Poets with two young Chinese actors. The video was first exhibited at Red T Space as part of the Dashanzi International Art Festival.

Thanks to Gao Yi Gang
Supported by Arts Council England