Private View: Tuesday 17 January 2006, 7:00PM to 9:00PM

Exhibition Run: 18 January 2006 to Sunday 19 February 2006

Artist: Angela Bulloch and Liam Gillick

Curated by David Bussel

In 1994 artist Georg Herold invited a number of British and German artists to participate in a project called Karaoke (Fußball-WM) (Karaoke Football – World Cup) for Portikus, Frankfurt. In so doing he hoped to create an `exchange of cultural differences … with predefined rules of the game’ by introducing a Karaoke element that would ‘break up and expand the predefined and tightly marked-out field’ of art. The exhibition, timed to coincide with the 1994 World Cup, followed an earlier exhibition that transformed Portikus into a bar and videotheque for the 1990 World Cup. Bulloch and Gillick rejected this curatorial directive and chose to take a `pre-football, before Karaoke` stance. This action involved digging a hole decorated with bunting and protected by a Herold-like wooden structure outside the main entrance to the space; planting a meadow on the land surrounding the building; and producing a video-manifesto at the Frankfurt Sportverband Hostel where all the British artists were housed. This `counter-context’ position expressed their scepticism about reinforcing national identities in order to transcend them once more: a strategy of détournement conceived by the artists as a kind of `Medieval conceptualism’. Reacting to their intervention, Kasper Koenig, then Director of Portikus, commissioned an archaeological survey of the hole and produced a book about it (Portikus Publication #58). Koenig, with the agreement of the artists, subsequently offered their hole to the City of Frankfurt-am-Main as a permanent public artwork in return for an annual wild boar feast, which the city declined.

For the exhibition the artists will revisit their 1994 work for Portikus at Cubitt: the original video produced in Frankfurt will be shown alongside reconstructed `artefacts’ and a wall text. In 2005, Cubitt presented a film and photography installation by Stephen Prina called Vinyl II, which examined site-specificity through the act of displacement (from the Getty Museum, Los Angeles to Cubitt, London). Working dialectically, We are Medi(eval) attempts to review a similar moment of `context art’. By reconstructing the work through a space/time dislocation, notions of site and context are posed and picked apart, leading toward future possibilities and actions; future holes and meadows.

Angela Bulloch (Canada/UK) and Liam Gillick (UK) have exhibited internationally since the early 90s. Bulloch’s recent projects include De Pont Foundation, Tilburg; Modern Art Oxford; Succession, Vienna; and Le Consortium, Dijon. Her work can currently be seen at Bloomberg Space, London.

Liam Gillick has recently presented exhibitions at the ICA, London; Casey Kaplan, New York; Corvi-Mora, London; and Palais de Tokyo, Paris.