Shop Floor

About

The artist run gallery, Camden Town Unlimited hosts its final exhibition before it is handed over to make way for a new private gallery space. In this terminating show, Camden Town Unlimited presents a film by the artist Peter Sant. Shot after hours in a nearby department store, Sant's film, Shop Floor uses the in-store furniture displays as film sets to reveal a disorderly account of the lives of a young middle-class Chinese family. The point of departure is the location itself—an upmarket department store situated in Tottenham Court Road, London. The film unwinds to depict the story of a family as they go through the routines of domestic everyday life. Price tags, and sale signs remain in shot as the bleak routines of their lives unfold bathed in coloured light and surrounded by designer tables, expensive dinnerware, fast food and a retro styled living room. Captured graciously by the slow camera, our female protagonist's night is disrupted by the arrival of a ghost-like European couple that exist in an atemporal dimension and manage to step into the future of her life. Through the oddness of its setting and storyline, Sant's film concentrates on the consequences of industrial capitalism—the global division of labour and the emergence of a new middle-class. Shop Floor takes its cue from several films including, Zhang Ke Jia's use of the Beijing World Park in The World (2004) and Michael Haneke's depiction of a Viennese middle-class family in Seventh Continent (1989) and in doing so manages to draw parallels between cinema and the project of modernity.