Falk

Selected for an artist-in-residence programme at Rogaland Kunstsenter, Stavanger, Norway by Director Martin Worts, Beech received grants and in-kind funding from ACE, Statoil, the Stavanger Oil Museum and the CAS helicopter pilot training simulator in Stavanger, enabling the filming on location of an 18 minute single-screen video work. Presenting the Norwegian landscape, its culture and its industry in TV documentary style, the video is inspired by, and is partly based on, a true story that began in Stavanger in the 1980s, centring on one man’s fight for justice and truth after the Alexander Kielland Oil Platform disaster in 1980.

Documenting key sites linked to this unusual story of political intrigue, and showing important parts of the evidence that supports this theory and the movements and motivations of the key players, the video footage is overlaid with bombastic text that accesses the motivations for the characters explored through historical documents, letters and newspapers that detail these events.

Posing new and significant questions regarding the role of individuated languages in society and their (in)stability in terms of expressing facts, truth and meaning, the work examines this by refusing to illustrate, support or exonerate the claims of the story. Rather, the work questions these abstract claims and counter-claims by embedding their language as literal expressions of belief in justice and truth and develops questions about the politics of experience and the materiality of language through the exposure of the relationship between the force of rhetoric and the rhetoric of force.

These connections between language, materiality and experience were expanded in a collaborative book ’Falk’ (MOT International, 2007 ISBN 0-9554061-3-7) that critiqued orthodox claims concerning the ubiquitous and spectacular power of individuated/universal languages, examined how these universal claims deliver particular experiences of force and acted out another strand of these narratives.

• http://www.motinternational.org/falk.htm...