Join Kerry Harker, Co-founder and Director of The Tetley, Zoe Sawyer, the Gallery’s curator and Laura Morrison, co-curator of Concerning The Bodyguard, for a conversation about this extensive exhibition of paintings, sculpture, video and performance housed throughout the building.
Laura Morrison says: “However pleasing, when a detached interlocutor – here, male – directs our attention to fragility, will it ever be what it says it is. This exhibition entertains the question of who can be willfully vulnerable, who can only be exposed and made vulnerable and how these power dynamics are played out in contemporary art. It reflects on histories of paranoia, cynicism and the problems with self-defence and future orientation.”
A short story of the same name by American writer, Donald Barthelme, acted as the provocation for 15 artists with growing international reputations to respond to and expand upon the central themes of the story. The narrator builds the character of a bodyguard by accumulating doubts and uncertainties with a cool, detached form of questioning. Through a rhetorical layering of vulnerability and security, the narrator preserves the reader’s distance to the bodyguard’s personal, social and political experience. The exhibition offers us the opportunity to consider if and how detached narration, which can limit how we speak and act, can be challenged.
The exhibition follows a research residency at The Tetley.
Artists include: Benjamin Orlow, Amir Chasson, Sidsel Christensen, James Iveson, Nina Wakeford, Daniel Lichtman, Evariste Maïga, Jessica Tsang, Matthew McQuillan, Warren McLachlan, Laura Morrison, JL Murtaugh, Ciarán Ó Dochartaigh, Nathan Witt and Alison Ballance.
Places are free for Contemporary Art Society Members. Please contact Moira Innes on moira@contemporaryartsociety.org or 07946 604 109.