Installation in the old reference library at Brighton Museum as part of the 2014 Brighton Festival.
I heard YS in discussion with Hofesh Schechter, artistic director of the festival, on 7 May. Lots of interesting points especially on immigration, but for me in particular:
His approach to the installation: it was low budget, he could have covered all the old bookshelves and turned the room into a gallery space, but he decided - as he put it - to let the space give him the work, to be his muse i.e he worked from what was already there, the empty bookshelves, the library environment, the vestiges of its past.
[Although this is a well-established way of responding to site, there was something moving about the way he spoke that reinforced the approach which I connected how I want to work with my commission at Brighton Buddhist Centre.]
He also talked about authenticity: that the kind of fabric he uses everything thinks of as African and that he's making a point about colonialism when he splices it into typically British subjects. He takes pleasure in the fact that it's in fact Dutch-Indonesian in origin, so the use of it parodies authenticity. (Of course it still makes a point about colonialism. . . )
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