HOME THEATRE: Group Show

During the production of The Tread and The Rise, Toby Christian’s first solo exhibition at Baró Galeria, the artist invited a group of artists to contribute a video for a subsequent group exhibition at the gallery.

The installation in Christian’s exhibition centred around a life-size mapping of his then current residence in London, opening the volumes of his living spaces out into that of the gallery, influencing his decision to invite a group of his peers, largely UK based, to also contribute to the fabric of the Gallery in Sao Paulo.

Works within Home Theatre contain a wide range of approaches to video making – contributions include those from artists for whom film and video is not their primary medium, and as such the screening contains experimental pieces, some of which were made specifically for this event.

The curatorial brief to exhibit a video for these artists was not prescriptive – artists were not asked to respond to a singular thematic – and as such, the exhibited videos form both tangential and diverse responses to the opportunity, inspired by the initial installation.

But while these works are necessarily distinct, a growing number of resonancescan be found when watching. Rehearsals shown here are staged, sketched, and scripted, whilst musical performance is equally scored, improvised and subverted. At times the videos seem to attempt to directly interfere with accepted vantages of the camera itself, misusing equipment for artistic purposes.

Topographical displacement features heavily in the screening too – works that deliberately form an abstraction of place, through its filmed transcription.

(Toby Christian)