16 Sep 2011

Kirschner & Panos at Hollybush Gardens

Anja Kirschner and David Panos' recent feature length films 'The Empty Plan' (2010) and 'The Last Days of Jack Sheppard' (2009) have increasingly revolved around the nature of performance and narrative construction and their role in the formation of subjectivity and political agency.

'living truthfully under imaginary circumstances' is a new multi-channel video installation, made for their first solo exhibition at Hollybush Gardens. The work considers the acting techniques developed by Sanford Meisner, which remain highly influential on American cinema and drama.

Based on a set of persuasive assumptions about the 'true' nature of human behaviour, the Meisner technique paradoxically combines an un-natural training routine of intense repetition and observational feedback with the prospect of authentic experience and emotion in performance.

The installation combines footage of young actors working with Meisner's exercises and material from the history of theatre and cinema. Kirschner & Panos aim to interrogate the assumptions of post-modern naturalism and its blurring of the distinction between dramatic artifice and seemingly 'primal', 'human' impulses.

Kirschner & Panos are short listed for the The Jarman Award 2011.

Anja Kirschner (*1977, Munich) & David Panos (*1971, Athens) live and work in London. Recent solo exhibitions include Staatsgalerie Stuttgart (2011), Kunsthall Oslo (2011), Focal Point Gallery, Southend-on-Sea (2010), Chisenhale Gallery, London (2009), Centre for Contemporary Arts, Glasgow (2009); Badischer Kunstverein, Karlsruhe (2009) and Transmission Gallery, Glasgow (2008); recent group shows include British Art Show 7, Nottingham, London, Glasgow, Plymouth (2010/2011), 'There Is No Alternative', Konsthall C, Stockholm (2010), 'Depression', Marres, Maastricht (2009); 'Everything Then Passes Between Us', Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne (2009) and 'Nought to Sixty', Institute of Contemporary Arts, London (2008).