PEOPLE ON SUNDAY at IBID Projects until Saturday 11 August

People on Sunday at Ibid Projects, Hoxton Square, London. 28 June - 11 August 2012

Ed Atkins, Shumon Basar, Ruth Beale, Sarah Elliott, Simon Fujiwara, Kazimierz Jankowski, Andrew Kerton, Chuck Kissick, Gil Leung, Kathy Noble, Rachel Pimm, Patrick Shier, John Smith, Donald Urquhart and Ariella Yedgar

A project by Olivier Castel, Katie Guggenheim and Justin Jaeckle that responds to the site of the top floor of IBID, turning the gallery into a live cinema through which to watch the action in Hoxton Square below.
The project is titled after the 1930 silent German film, directed by Curt and Robert Siodmak from a screenplay by Billy Wilder. The film features five ‘non-actors’ (including a wine seller, taxi driver, film extra and model playing versions of themselves, and follows their leisure pursuits over the course of one summer weekend in Weimar Berlin. A deliberate entanglement of fiction and reality, the film could be considered a very early precedent of  contemporary scripted reality television. The film opens with the prologue “Filmstudio 1929 presents its first experiment: People on Sunday, a film without actors. These five people appear in front of the camera for the first time, today they are all back in their own jobs.”

For the exhibition, Castel, Guggenheim and Jaeckle have invited a range of artists and writers to contribute short texts of imagined scenarios and scenes that could be viewed in Hoxton Square over the course of the exhibition, functioning as intertitles or speculative screenplays for the reality unfolding outside of the gallery, and casting the occupants of the square as characters in a real life, real-time movie. It is anticipated that some of these texts will be realised during the show.


ibidprojects.com/people-on-a-sunday/