Althea Thauberger
Chelsea Girls | 2008 | 1:04:00mins | Dual 16mm Projection | Canada
Althea Thauberger’s internationally produced and exhibited work typically involves collaboration or interactions with individuals, groups or communities and result in performances, films, videos, audio recordings, and books. Thauberger gravitates towards social enclaves—groups of people who exist or develop in some form of seclusion and are often perpetuated by social controls—that are both coercive and voluntary. Her work provides constraints for her subjects to work within that may echo the ones in which they live. These constraints may be structural imperatives or conventions of particular film or photographic media, which play with our sense of allegory, or at times, seriality.
—
Commissioned by the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, Thauberger’s project takes the 1966 Andy Warhol film of the same name as a point of departure to collaboratively produce a portrait of a Victoria housing complex and the socio-political issues with the residents who live there. Living on site for two months in order to work collaboratively with the inhabitants, the audio and visual recordings that Thauberger produced are presented side by side in the same dual-projection format as Warhol’s film, suggesting the plural experiences of parallel lives.
Featured in: Chelsea Girls
Featured in: Thought On Film
