She was a Visitor [performance]

‘She was a Visitor’ encompasses a large-scale installation featuring a 24-metre long cyclorama wall lit entirely with red lights, accompanied by a spoken word and sound performance.

The work is an expansion of research into the last remaining videotape recordings of a 1970s community television project and the activists who allegedly appropriated its objectives. Both aspects of the installation and performance investigate, through distinct spatial and performative means, questions of visibility, subjective agency and construction of community through its image.

The architecture of the cyclorama was developed in reference to film and television production, an infinity space for the projection of a multitude of fictions. The ambient red light sublimates a reference to radical militant cinema. On entering the installation, the viewer temporarily becomes complicit in a theatrical rendering of their own self-awareness: physically subsumed by the red colour cast of the light, their eyes adjust to a monochromatic vision not unlike that seen in the historical black and white video recordings.

The installation was activated through a series of live performances based around a spoken word monologue shaped by a reverberating live bass sound. The piece interweaves latent narrative histories of radical militant cinema through the prism of the cyclorama and vision itself. These took place on the final day of the exhibition on 11 January 2015.

The large-scale installation and performance ‘She was a Visitor’ was part of the major solo exhibition ‘Mirror Speech’ at BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, between 31 October 2014 and 11 January 2015, produced with the support of BALTIC and Goldsmiths University of London.