www.labour’sownsoundingideal.co.uk (2019)
HD Video with sound. 23″ 25″ Originally produced for the exhibition “Labour’s Own Sounding Ideal” at the Pump House Gallery, London.
www.laboursownsoundingideal.com is a video recording of an anonymous user engaging with a speculative website. The website consists of forty-three video clips organised in response to thirteen historical events, dating from 1971 to the present. Documenting the music video’s development across shifting political, technological and economic conditions, the website contains extracts from a range of media sources – including music videos, artists’ video works and television broadcasts – that are accompanied by twelve short stories.
Each story seeks to establish connections between a historical event and it’s cast of characters. From the adolescent figure depicted in Kenneth Anger’s short film Scorpio Rising (1963) to the contemporary female subject exemplified by Beyonce’s Formation (2016), the extracts trace the emergence of differing subjectivities across historical time. The effects of changes to the global political economy – from the dropping gold standard in 1971 to the financial crisis of 2008 – echo within each extract’s frame. Just as the contemporary landscape is reshaped and remade daily by fluctuations in the flow of money and goods, so too is the artwork shaped by the relations it travels through.