Table Animals

2010
Performance
Collaboration with Vlatka Horvat


Images: © Tim Etchells and Vlatka Horvat

Table Animals unfolds through a continuous process of call and response between Tim Etchells and Vlatka Horvat as they face each other across a table in the performance space or gallery. The audience are mobile and unseated, able to get close to the performance, they can arrive, depart and return at any time.

Taking it in turns to arrange and rearrange a set of wooden and plastic toy animals in the bordered expanse of the table-top, the two artists engage in a shifting game that seems to move between making patterns, narratives, formal arrangements and pictures from their chosen materials. A playful and competitive trading back and forth of elements within a pre-arranged performative frame, Table Animals is also a kind of silent table-top theatre in which the surface of the table becomes a slowly changing stage.

First presented at Aichii Trieniale 2010.