For those not wishing to buy a festival pass, there is still some of IBT that you can see completely FREE! From 1 - 12 February within Arnolfini galleries, you can see much of This Secret Location (below) along with alot of the Breathing Space commisions. Please be aware that some performances contain work with adult themes or imagery. Performances marked !! contain adult themes or imagery. Parents/guardians should exercise caution when bringing under 16s along.
Artists include Alex Bradley, Charles Poulet, Lynette Wallworth, Ryoji Ikeda, George Poonkhin Khut and Daniel Belasco Rogers (plan b)
In this technological era, the way we perceive the world is changing forever. Much of these developments are too new and subtle to understand fully, but we can say that they are gathering momentum.
This Secret Location is a range of extraordinary works by national and international artists who occupy the gap between live and digital practice. Featuring new commissions and premieres, This Secret Location is a showcase of the hybridity between the 'real' and the “virtual'.
Alex Bradley and Charles Poulet’s Whiteplane_2 uses ambisonics and large-scale planes of shimmering light to create an immersive work of beauty and subtle disorientation - a seemingly impossible place where strangers might one day meet.
In Still:Waiting, Lynette Wallworth creates an ecosystem where the audience by its very presence contributes to the revelation of the work. Interactive high-definition video and a surround sound-scape depict the dramatic arrival and departure of flocks of birds in eerie twilight and questions whether there may be ways of meeting across cultural distance that do not cause rupture.
Japan’s leading electronic composer and artist Ryoji Ikeda presents Spectra II, a narrow, alternately dark/bright corridor that only permits one visitor at a time. Pushing digital technologies to their utmost limit, subtle oscillation patterns occur around our ears caused by our own movements, so suggesting a unique orientation for our future.
Cardiomorphologies is a restrained, quiet experience that enables people to observe and then interact with their breathing and heart-rate patterns whilst reclining in a comfortable chair. In this way, George Poonkhin Khut explores subtle bodily interfaces with technology.
Our House is the opportunity to wander around Arnolfini as if it was a 1930s semi detached house stacked full of one family’s history. Dan Belasco Rogers (plan b) has taken his mum’s house, bought by his grandmother in 1936 and using handheld computers that sense location, has mapped it into the interior of Arnolfini.
Located throughout Arnolfini, as well as L-Shed, This Secret Location is accompanied by a series of unique artists talks, tours and live performances - see the Education section for more details.
The ‘kiss-in’ is a live art snog-fest, with a mission to examine and record every type and shape of kiss both as a sculpture and as a digital portrait. Dressed in dental outfits, Charlie Murphy and her assistants invite and proposition the audience to contribute their unique expression of desire to the project.Dental casting material is spooned into their mouths and they are asked to hold their pose for one minute until it sets. Each mouth and way of kissing creates a unique expression of desire.kiss-in-between is a site specific presentation created to respond to the context of This Secret Location and the newly refurbished Arnolfini.The casts and portraits are being collected towards The Anatomy of Desire; an ongoing project which includes erotic glass sculptures, photography and video.
Since 2003, Eve Dent has been making the Anchor Series, a series of impromptu interventions within numerous sites in the UK and abroad. Based around ideas of the body as a medium through which the poetic life of a site or building is expressed, she attempts to fit her body into the nooks, crannies or internal holes or cavities that exist within the architecture. Her work for Inbetween Time will be a playful exploration of the encounter between audience, body and site of Arnolfini’s bookshop influenced by the methods of ‘authentic movement’.
“In Manuel Vason’s partnerships with artists…. a performance work is either restaged anew or developed specifically for his camera. These projects, works of pure collaboration, differ in principle from conventional performance documentation in that Vason, camera in tow, is always the sole witness to the singular live event, which also takes place in a non-theatrical space of the artists’ choosing…“As points of departure , each collaboration is predicted on a series of mutual concerns; a challenge to the role of the camera and of photography in relation to individual and group activity; a fascination with the body, in its multiple and radical diversity; and an interrogation of new forms of collaborative practice.”
“Bruce Willis and Sylvester Stallone sharing a shower.
Gene Hackman loading a gun.
Tom Cruise on an operating table.
Susan Sarandon’s head in a bucket.
Arnold Schwarzenegger in a room that is slowly filling up with human shit.”
Packed with death, danger, jetlag and sex, Starfucker creates a mischievous, imaginary movie conjured up in text and soundtrack alone. The viewer is invited to imagine a catalogue of Hollywood A- and B-list stars in a sequence of (unlikely) violent and intimate scenarios.
The Shadowers is “an overwhelming experience... a dream logic worthy of Kafka on an absinthe binge.” -Darren Tofts, RealTime. This is an installation that portrays a chain of abstract and surreal interactions between a trio of characters, as games and exchanges are played out within the realm of video. The physical and emotional create a coded language describing pain, desire and the fragility of existence. The action is set in a lush, outdoor environment and dark, flip side spaces, feeling claustrophobic, dreamlike and minimal.
John Gillies’ digital film & installation Divide, features 4 men, 35 sheep, a Chinese opera singer and a horse, in a landscape with texts from the Old Testament. Historical consciousness of Australia’s British and European inheritance is at the heart of this visually stunning black and white film that re-views the influence of Christian rhetoric in discourses and images of colonial settler culture. With performances by Denis Beaubois, Ari Ehrlich, Xu Feng Shan, Matt Millay, Dalisa Pigram and Lee Wilson, this work is the latest development in a cinematic project deeply connected to the physical tradition of Sydney performance culture.
Deborah Pollard’s Shapes of Sleep is both a sculptural installation and an eight-hour durational performance based on video footage of sleeping. The conscious and unconscious movements of the recorded sleepers are presented in miniature, whilst five live performers, each with their own set of instructions, move between various sleeping postures. The performers follow a script, their actions are conscious and contrived. The duration of the work creates the possibility for the performers to fall asleep, blurring the boundaries between fiction and authenticity – choreographed and everyday slumber.
Treating the personal stereo as petri-dish, and the headphones as microscope, Duncan Speakman breaks down the links between place and the transient nature of sound. For this initial investigation he looks at how site-specific sound work can become a commodity, and how sound allows to us position ourselves both spatially and socially in an environment. A mixture of fictional and documentary sound recordings help the listener navigate the hidden spaces of Bristol's floating harbour.Duration 20 minutes
Avoiding Dark Ali's is a projected video work depicting the documentation of a live performance far removed from its original context. Playing with language and culture as personally written jokes, the work highlights tensions around religious and racial identity. Jokes and puns are used to explore assumptions of stereotype within the context of personal experience.
Trained by a TV make-up artist, Uninvited Guests lovingly fabricate bloody wounds on each other’s bodies. Over 6 hours these fake cuts multiply and proliferate across their skin. Performers become surfaces marked by real and on-screen violence, both a living memorial and a warning of what might be to come. The audience shares in the intimate eroticism of wounds, getting up close and personal, confronting your desire both to look and look away. The live soundtrack is produced by sampling the performers’ internal body sounds. This is the durational sequel to Schlock, which toured nationally in 2004-5.
Prank calls, long goodbyes and home truths all form part of The Special Guests’ “the telephone game.” This is a slippery sport of fictional phone calls in which the audience should get ready for foul play and fair play which divides the fibbers from the fools. Some dutifully follow instructions whilst others deliberately loosen the screws. A concept originally touched on in This Much I Know (Part One), witness the colour drain when stretched out to four hours. …
For this new durational performance The Special Guests will be working with sound artist Tom Bugs (www.bugbrand.co.uk).
