Wednesday 9 – Saturday 19 November:
Signal, Flinders Walk, Northbank, Melbourne 3000
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Sunday 20 November:
MPavillion, Queen Victoria Gardens, St Kilda Rd, Melbourne 3004
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Jacqui Shelton’s performance work, News of the building of the wall uses Kafka’s short story of the same name as a starting point for an investigation into the intimate and physical ways in which we communicate. It is less of an artwork and more an encounter, in that the work can only be accessed through a one-on-one encounter with the artist and the willing engagement of the participant. A participant arrives at an organised time at the threshold of a space where the artist greets them. The artist then recites Kafka’s short story to them while meeting the participant’s gaze. The artist helps the participant memorise the story verbatim, working through a process for memorisation decided on by the participant. The artist helps the participant learn as much of the story as they can in the time they have, yet unavoidably the story is never memorised in its completion.
The process of working together through the story requires both the artist and the participant to relinquish a level of control to the other. There is a clear space of difference between the participant and the artist, as the artist works from a hierarchy of knowledge and the participant from a position of curiosity, trust, and ultimately control as the process and timeframe of the work is determined by them. Within the framework of memorising the story, the artwork itself could take many forms, yet all hinges on language and how one communicates with another by throwing their voice across a divide (divide of physicality, knowledge, language, cultural difference, etc). The work results in a subtle intimacy through the meeting of voices and individual processes of accessing memory, across the political and poetically loaded physical act of speaking. The work seeks to consider not how difference between people can be overcome but how the meeting point of difference is in the intimacy of dialogue and the space in which the voice is projected.
