Shave - two channel synchronised video

This extended video work explored the themes of the time and narrative combined with the idea of the artwork as a space for human freedom, both for the participants in the work and its subsequent viewers. Recent works such as ‘Security’ which was shown as part of Moscow Girls and Other Stories in Berlin in 2006 (see output 1) and earlier portrait work has enabled the viewer to encounter the naked human body as a non-coerced but consenting natural subject. Specifically this has meant developing ideas of a natural rather than ‘beautified’ subject, of human embodiment free to express itself and of the video medium allowing the viewer a prolonged encounter with the subject(s).

Shave is an unscripted narrative of a man being helped in a very personal activity that of having his face shaved. The narrative shows in close up the effects of this delicate operation on the man being shaved, its staged processes and importantly how such a seeming mundane activity impacts on the body as a whole. The narrative encounter for the viewer is prolonged and the man body becomes both a familiar and non-familiar subject through the act of looking, particularly as the key narrative cue is to move from being unshaved to shaved. An underlying theme of Shave is that as we undergo transformations, we become strangers to ourselves.

At the Venice Biennale (01/06/07-01/07/07 Shave was exhibited along with work of five other artists linked by the theme of transformation, Simon Faithfull, Beate Gütschow, Anne Hardy, ‘Igloo’ and ‘Stanza’. Shave has also been exhibited at the Chelouche Gallery for Contemporary Art in Tel Aviv 23/10/07-08/12/07.

Images of Shave in installation at Galerie m can be viewed on http://www.m-bochum.de/artist_image_en.php?aid+170&aname+MelanieManchot