Double Agent, Institute of Contemporary Arts

Double Agent
Group show, ICA. 9th March 2008

“Everyone knows about fiction, but no one knows about reality.”

‘Double Agent’ is a current exhibition “of art works and collaborative projects in which the artist uses other people as a medium” Beyond the idea of using other people, the public, the key inspirations for my own project here came from what the collected works had to say about notions of truth, reality and opinion.

In general the works present an involvement with “other people” documented through video or display. However they also in most cases, and in a way not always immediately apparent, involve the audience of the exhibition. In many of the works, we worry about how the artist might have exploited, tricked or manipulated their public, for example in a series of lectures where the lecturer is in fact an avatar controlled remotely by the artist speaking in their ear. However, the double-layered nature of this particular project (two false lectures are presented simultaneously) makes me wonder after a while if I too am being presented with a false idea of the reality presented. Another project by Artur Zmijewski, shows four meetings where representatives of significant groups in Poland make their own banners to represent their beliefs, and are then allowed to alter each others’, with the whole process documented through digital video. Some uncomfortable situations occur, such as the Socialists branding the All-Polish Youth as nazi sympathisers, and the Catholics revealing a difficult relationship to homosexuality and womens’ rights. Watching the results, though, we wonder, having seen other works beforehand, whether what we are watching is documentary or fiction.

[images from Double Agent free leaflet]

I first wonder what a similar model might generate in Fontainhas: bringing together various interest groups and setting off a similar process. Here, the repeat performance is reminiscent of the work of Stephen Willets who interviews people, with the same set of questions, again and again at different times of the year and over large periods of time.

More than this, however, the exhibition has made me conscious of the responsibility I have placed on myself as a person aiming, with the best of intentions, to represent the currently underrepresented opinions of the people of Fontainhas. Inevitably, perhaps, my editing and presentation of honest conversations become fiction through their editing. Inevitably they serve my own agenda however indirectly.

Whenever I present my project to a group of people, the idea of mist tends to catch the imagination far more than other aspects of the project- the latter tending to be ‘true’ stories of cultural or personal situations. The mist becomes a vessel for a contagious fiction.