Mirror Speech [Solo Exhibition]

BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead presents a major solo exhibition by British artist Gail Pickering.

For her exhibition Mirror Speech, Gail Pickering draws from her research into a pioneering social experiment in community television which took place in France in the 1970s. Participants of the project disputed the image they had once collectively made culminating in a climate of widespread distrust about its political objectives. The last remaining recordings of their live broadcasts provide a space for Pickering to address the subjectivity of the televisual image itself, fictionalising the literal cuts of the historical material.

The artist has wholly transformed the gallery space with a series of interconnected chambers where she has imagined a site for this cultural production and their social spaces to suggest a place of live transmission. Pickering uses montage within her videos to mimic the episodic and fragmentary character of both television and the video tape recordings.

Central to all the works in the exhibition is the use of the voice. All the on-screen characters instinctively mouth a shared monologue, a collective voice that shifts between being a story-teller, a conversationalist and an interrogator, each addressing the choreography of images that we see. The artist uses dubbing and lip-synching to produce a narrative that explores the physicality of the projected image and both the space in which the community found itself.

Pickering's video and performance works often function as social proposals that involve a process of collaboration working with amateurs, professional actors and performers. By referring to specific sites and historical and political events, the artist speculates on notions of temporality and presence.