Karin Kihlberg and Reuben Henry

Viewers are bombarded, completely unexpectedly, by the intermittent sound of a racing train in this exhibition. In The Editors Intervention, 2008, the collaborative team Karin Kihlberg and Reuben Henry cite a similar noise that was added during the postproduction of Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather (1972), even though the scene in the film does not depict a station, track, or train. Through an exploration of reality and fiction, Kihlberg and Henry investigate the value and significance of the mechanisms and relationships of power that are established between artists, art, and the audience. Performance #1, #2, & #3, 2007–2008, a triptych of video projections that seems to illustrate the artists performing in galleries in Prague, Manchester, and Umeå, is actually not faithful performance documentation at all. While creating the works, the artists invited the audience to participate through storyboards and instructions, then employed sound effects and a strongly cinematographic aesthetic in their editing of the videos. The results are particularly intriguing because they often reference works by established performance artists such as Chris Burden and Marina Abramovich.

The opposite of animation or liveliness is offered in a series of drawings titled Acting Dead, 2008. These portraits depict actors “playing dead” in famous films. In one, a likeness of Jack Nicholson’s character R. P. McMurphy in Milos Foreman’s One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975) impersonates a death that seems real, crude, and universal. It appears to be a slow demise, which cannot be followed by another frame.

Translated from Italian by Marguerite Shore.