Telegraph Hill Festival, m2 Gallery and Goldsmiths, University of London present: Pause - a 24/7 public exhibition of moving-image portraits that elicit face-to-face conversations without words between diverse people engaging deeply but silently with each other.
Venue: m2 Gallery, Kings Grove, Peckham SE15 2NB
March 8th – April 19th
Opening with Tea & Cakes: Sunday March 8th 4-6pm
Imagine you and I are standing opposite each other. I may silently acknowledge that I am here and you are there, even although your here is my there and vice-versa.
My here exists only in relation to you, and your here exists only in relation to me. There is no inherently existing here or there for either of us.
Nevertheless, both of our impressions are accurate in the context of our contrasting perspectives and it would be mistaken for either of us to suppose that our here does not exist at all.
While there is little doubt that we each exist as discrete entities; in crucially important respects, I only exist because you exist and you only exist because I exist.
In amplifying patterns of involuntary saccadic eye movement, facial micro-muscle activity and breathing fluctuations, Pause foregrounds minute communications that spontaneously occur at high velocity beneath the binary layers of likes and dislikes upon which we habitually define ourselves.
Engaging with Pause involves entering a reciprocal stream of cognitive activity that dissolves boundaries of language, religion, culture, politics, ethnicity, age, gender, socio-economic status and personal sovereignty. Participants subliminally discover how in vital if unknowable respects, each of us is also ‘the other person’.
While established photographic terminology is replete with the language of aggressive material acquisition (we ‘take’ pictures; we ‘shoot’ photographs and films; we ‘capture’ images), Pause advocates a receptive rather than an acquisitive approach, in which the formulation of images is conceived of as an interaction between perceiver and perceived, not as a conquest.
Pause functions as an antidote to politics of estrangement founded on difference. The accent is on inter-connectedness not otherness. Participants and observers are regarded as co-creators and collaborators.
In an era of aggressive, competitive individualism (predicated on dualism), Pause advocates a unified alternative. Images are not ‘about’ their subject-matter. Indeed, no hierarchy is proposed between artist and subject. In this configuration of creativity, the artist is positioned as an unselfconscious catalyst rather than a self-determined author.
Cinematography – Gerry McCulloch
Picture Grading – Chico Dall’Igna