Steve Farrer

About

This exhibition, shown as an immersive installation, is a new commission by the artist and experimental film-maker Steve Farrer. Best known for his work related to the notions around expanded cinema - which offers an alternative perspective in filmmaking by reinterpreting the given conditions of the cinematic medium - Farrer’s work opens up questions around the spectator’s construction of time/space relations and activates the live context of watching.

Shot at the De La Warr Pavilion’s auditorium, the principle sequence is based on mesmerizing and dream-like scene, The Kingdom of the Shades, from the French choreographer Marius Petipa’s La Bayadère, first performed in 1877. The long and slow repeated-arabesque sequence involves the entire corps de ballet, dancing one by one, in formal articulation across the stage in perfect accumulated unison. The orientation grids of the sequence are revisited in Farrer’s work; the mast ranks of the corps replicated in the multiple exposure of a single performer’s gesture, repeated and looped through the camera and projector. The work interrogates an accepted cinematic experience, giving it a new perspective and engaging the speculation of the audience.