Sleeping Lions (2019)
HD Video with sound. 5” 20” Originally produced for the exhibition “Labour’s Own Sounding Ideal” at the Pump House Gallery, London.
Inhabiting the contradictory status of the ‘pop-promo’ – representing both artwork and advert – Sleeping Lions brings together two short scenes. In the first, a teenage girl reads a poetic text confronting ideas of capture, coercion and game playing; in the second, she is seen rehearsing to fragments of Rihanna’s “We Found Love in a Hopeless Place”. Singing along to Rihanna’s mechanically produced voice, the teenager’s vocals mimetically reproduce both human and machine-like qualities.
The work stages contradictions of commodification. The performer is seen wearing a t-shirt associated with a 2012 court-case, in which Rihanna sued Topshop for ‘unlawful’ use of her image; she also wears a t-shirt featuring artwork by the See Red Woman’s Workshop from 1978. The on-going tension between the so-called freedom of infinite possibilities available in adolescence and the rule-based operations of adult life under capital are performed throughout the work.
Credits: Amy Lally (performer) Daniel Dressel (camera).