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Bethany Murray’s practice is situated around the performative body and photography. Her primary site for research uses reconstructions of memory in relation to place. She uses written performative texts to form the starting point for much of her staged photographs.

The photographs are filmic in their aesthetic, sometimes sequenced and use her as the central performer although other actors and passers-by are also involved. By placing herself in this way and using ideas of role-play she moves between the boundaries of photographer and performer, questioning where the authority lies, re-working the gaze. The work questions whose stories are portrayed, how memory itself can be transitory and engages the viewer in unresolveable narratives.

Avoided Spaces is a photographic project made in specific locations throughout London. An element of performance is always present as the photographs are constructed with a particular memory attached to each place. She uses a variety of approaches from tying a polaroid camera to the body in her initial work in the space to re-filming the work on a large format camera with assistance. The photographs imply through re-enactment that memory is a fluid concept, and above all is open to change and transformation.

Large cinematic colour photographs are placed alongside black and white polaroids, which reference throwaway tests of film that stage and echo the idea of the distillation of memory. The polaroids form a body in the work, which represent an internal dialogue of process and unconscious thoughts surrounding the construction of memory. The work as a whole invites the viewer to question their own relationship to place and memory and to the areas we avoid both emotionally and therefore politically and to the tense dialogue between the two.

Untitled 1, from Avoided Spaces

2007
Lightjet Photograph
122 x 158 cm

Untitled 2, from Avoided Spaces

2007
Lightjet Photograph
122 x 158 cm

Untitled 3, from Avoided Spaces

2007
Black and White Polaroid
14 x 10.5 cm

Untitled 4, from Avoided Spaces (detail)

2007
Black and White Polaroid
14 x 10.5 cm

Untitled 1, from Avoided Spaces

2007
Black and White Polaroid
14 x 10.5 cm