The Closest You Can Come To Escape

23 July 2007

A nice invite for my video Starfucker as part of a show which will be in Stadtgalerie, Bern this September 8 – October 21st.

Curator Barnaby Drabble wrote me:

I originally saw the work in a hotel in St Sebastian at around three in the morning when i drunkenly turned on the tv set in the corner of the room and encountered the work (in Spanish) broadcast on a late night arts channel. I was thoroughly confused about what exactly I was watching, I had been hoping for figure skating.

The show Ein Zweites Leben/A Second Life sounds great in fact, with the following narrative explaining part of it’s rationale:

As a short and easy overlooked side-plot in his most famous detective novel The Maltese Falcon, the American author Dashiel Hammet introduces us to the story of an everyday estate-agent named Flitcraft who, after a close brush with death on his lunch-break, leaves his wife and baby and simply disappears. When Hammet’s detective Sam Spade manages to track him down he finds him living under an assumed name in another suburb, similar to the one he lived in before, married to a woman more or less the same age as his wife, with a baby much like the one he left behind. When confronted by Spade, Flitcraft shows no remorse, explaining that in his organized life this was the closest he could come to escape.

In the third in a series of international exhibitions looking at contemporary pop-cultural phenomena the British curator Barnaby Drabble shows works from a selection of artists who deal with issues of re-enactment, multiple identities, double-agency and parallel worlds…

 

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