Fluchtpunkt, 2022
A/V installation, 12 min approx.
Commissioned for Salamagundy, Dreamland, Margate, 2022. Produced by Turner Contemporary Gallery.
Artist Mark Leckey invited me to stage a live work for Salamagundy, a variety show. The event featured the traditional set up of a curtained stage in front of a seated audience in the historic setting of Dreamland in Margate, an old fashioned amusement park. In lieu of a performance I created Fluchtpunkt (vanishing point; place of refuge), a suspenseful choreography of animated stagecraft.
During the piece, a theatrical curtain parts to reveal a ‘Stars in Their Eyes’ style smoking doorway. A spotlight roves between the open curtain, the stage and the audience, accompanied by an audio track of sampled Eurodance vocals and extreme weather sounds (thunder and lighting, rain, wind). Using hostile elemental effects and odd moments of pause and tension, the work keeps its audience perpetually at arms length in anticipating a performer who never arrives, conjuring the space beyond the stage as a portal to a fantasy realm of the viewer’s own making.
The work is highly adaptable and has been presented as a looped installation for galleries and club spaces, where the work becomes an immersive environment.
“...A gestalt whose separate elements come together in an atmospheric manifestation of their conceptual elegance. Taking the viewer into the heart of its storm, in spite of its cues to dance – strobes, dry ice and a rhythmic soundtrack – it rewards a certain stillness. Static, the gallery-goer can give way to the experiences it offers; the dramatic approximations of thunder claps and running water, digitally contrived in a recording studio. Read from another perspective, its tumult acts as a reminder of the inescapability of the climate crisis. Caught up in the smoke of its urgency, somehow humanity does its best to ignore the fire, dancing all the while to its oblivion.” - Desmond Bullen, Northern Soul, 2024
Fluchtpunkt installed as an immersive club environment for Basket 3, SOUP, Manchester, 2023.