Abstract

Joint event between Field Notes and Cambridge Performance Network 28 April 2014 at 18.30

Dr Khadija Zinnenburg Carroll (Art History, Berlin/Cambridge) Adrien Sina (Curator & Art Historian, London) Dr Michal Murawski Gold Zamt (Social Anthropology, Cambridge)

Chair: Dr Nikolai Ssorin-Chaikov (Social Anthropology, Cambridge)

Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll and Michal Murawski will present their most recent collaboration on Semi-Prison,

will present their most recent collaboration on Semi-Prison, a performance installation that investigates what happens to the relationship between you and your own home, when a judge or a policeman turns it into a prison. Semi-Prison is an ambitious large-scale installation based on a conceptual ethnography of dissidents under house arrest. It puts the visitor in the midst of what goes on inside an Embassy, when an outlaw fleeing the state moves in and turns it into a residence-cum-sanctuary (diplomatic asylum). This presentation offers a peek into what will be presented and invites the audience for feedback

Semi-Prison is structured on the same principles as Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll’s body of work in East Berlin’s former diplomatic buildings, Embassy Embassy (2010), by recreating in various media, on a scale of 1:1, five contrasting spaces of state-enforced domestic confinement within the eerily dreary rooms of a semi-detached house. In it artists explore how the twin Leviathans of state power and mass culture make their presence felt within the intimate zone of the home. The content of the recreated spaces are determined through original anthropological and archival investigations carried out by the artists involved, and build on ‘ethnographic conceptualist’ experiments carried out during 2011-2013 out by a group of artists and ethnographers including Nikolai Ssorin-Chaikov, Carroll and Murawski at Cambridge University.

Open to all. No registration required