Presented at Prague Quadrennial 2019 as part of the Emergence Exhibition at the Industrial Palace, Prague and representing the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.
Unframed invites you to consider the spaces you inhabit and the borders that define them.
Acknowledgements:
The Board of Trustees of the Victoria and Albert Museum wishes to express its sincere thanks to the many institutions and individuals who have assisted with this project.
Director: Emily Harris
Senior Curator: Kate Bailey
Assistant Curator: Helen Gush
Sound Design: Gareth Fry
Set Design Based on the design for Feral by Tortoise in a Nutshell, Designer Amelia Bird
Cinematography: Jonathan Bentovim, Nick Gordon Smith, Sam O’Mahony
In 2018, curators from the V&A went to the Edinburgh Festivals with the
aim of capturing the historical and contemporary significance of the festival city. Since the founding of the Edinburgh International Festival in 1947, Edinburgh has been a locus for the UK’s engagement with international theatre and performance cultures, a platform for the circulation of ideas on an international scale, a place where people gather from around the world.
Edinburgh Festivals is a place where aesthetic borders are tried, tested
and transcended – borders between nations, between art forms, between the stage and its audience, the show and backstage, the streets and the venue. Performers fill the streets and audiences are often part of the show. The city itself becomes the stage – a veritable kaleidoscope of theatrical expression from across the globe meeting, interacting and exchanging in one place. For these reasons, Edinburgh is a rite of passage for artists, both emerging and established, and many practitioners return year after year to immerse themselves in the heady mix of ideas, dialogues and practices. This project puts the spotlight on two practitioners whose work was showcased at the Edinburgh International Festival in 2018. Robert Carsen directed The Beggar’s Opera (King’s Theatre) and Akram Khan directed and performed in XENOS (Festival Theatre). Both practitioners work with international teams and take productions around the world. This context is key to the ongoing development of their creative practice and is decisive in shaping the pieces they produce.
To represent the spirit of these porous borders and the richness that arrives from combining manifold points of view, the film team captured spaces, performances and interviews from multiple perspectives, using varying lenses, frame rates and shot sizes. This wealth of footage was then edited to create collages, a technique that subverts the frame of the screen and disrupts the idea of borders within the cinematic construct. The component images in each collage are dependent on their relationship and juxtaposition with one another, creating a network of borders, which are traversed by something – a person, a car, a hat – that travels across the screen.
The brain then creates a new whole, visually permeating the borders of the collage and identifying a composite single image.
The film breaks out from its 2D form by spilling into the physical realm
in the form of the set model. These interdependent elements magnify and illuminate the subject and the themes, visually echoing one another, with the cut card assembly aesthetic of the model corresponding to the collage effect in the film.
Similarly, the sound design defies the 2D frame. Individual elements emanate from separate speakers, so that the sonic perspective changes depending on
the physical orientation of the viewer. No single vantage point offers a full composite sound. Instead, viewers are encouraged to seek out multiple perspectives while viewing the film and looking at the set model to enhance the experience.