"Untitled" from the series Confessions
2008
C-type print on aluminium
40" x 60" inches
"Form 5, 6 & 7"
2008
Duratran print in framed lightbox, ed. 5 + 2AP
32" x 48" inches
David Birkin's work is informed by the history of photography and its relationship to performance in contemporary art. By combining long exposure techniques with a conceptual methodology, his practice incorporates a specific performance into the image-making process and defines it within the parameters of that event. For example, in the series, FORM, the camera's exposure was determined by the length of time a physical posture could be maintained. The poses were deliberately contorted: loosely based on and extrapolated from the interrogatory 'stress positions' used by US military personnel at Abu Ghraib and other detention facilities, as well as the Classical poses that have defined aestheticised images of suffering in the Christian art historical tradition. The images also recall the extended exposures and protracted poses of Victorian photographic portraiture and Modernist preoccupations with mechanizing and objectifying the body, from Muybridge and Marey's 'motion studies' to the pseudo-scientific taxonomical endeavours of Charcot.
In this instance, the subject of the performance was the artist himself, and Birkin later re-interpreted these photographs as a live performance in which he held a stress position for four hours, naked and blindfolded, in a public place. The title of the piece, 4 HOURS, refers to a 2002 Pentagon memo authorising the use of 'enhanced interrogation' techniques for 'softening up' detainees. Scribbled at the bottom of the memo, the then Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, asked the question, "I stand for 8-10 hours a day. Why is standing limited to 4 hours?"
For the series CONFESSIONS, subjects were invited to confess a secret whilst left alone in a room facing a camera. When they felt ready, they opened the shutter and when they were finished, they closed it again, so that what determined a photograph's exposure was the length of time that person chose to speak. And for the series HOLD, in collaboration with Eloise Fornieles, Birkin borrowed the underlying conceit of Form and further divorced it from its torturous connotations by starting with a tender embrace between lovers and enforcing that position to the point of collapse.
To see more of David Birkin's work registered on Saatchi Online click here.
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