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By combining long exposure techniques with a conceptual methodology, his practise 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.

In each case, form is dictated by content and the photographic medium deconstructed by its own process. The images remain inextricably linked to the narratives embedded within them. In the Confessions, this narrative was made all the more ambiguous by a prerequisite confidentiality, since no one but the subject knew the specifics of a particular confession. As with Form, Birkin also reinterpreted these photographs as a live performance, THOUGHT, WORD AND DEED. The exhibition took place in a gallery converted from the old community hall at St. Matthew’s church in East London. Birkin decided to reconstruct the original confession box, with a tape recorder in place of the priest. Visitors were then invited to take confession, whilst their words were recorded onto a reel-to-reel audiotape that extended out and around a magnet, destroying the evidence as soon as it was created. Beside the installation was a simple black sign with a passage from Dante:

S'io credessi che mia risposta fosse
a persona che mai tornasse al mondo,
questa fiamma staria senza più scosse.
Ma per ciò che giammai di questo fondo
non tornò vivo alcun, s'i'odo il vero,
senza tema d'infamia ti rispondo.
Canto XXVII

“If I thought my reply were to one who would ever return to the world, this flame
would stay without further movement.
But since none has ever returned alive from this pit, if what I hear is true, I answer thee without fear of infamy.”

As with the photographs, nobody but the subject ever knew the specifics of a confession. Yet it had existed in a tangible form, albeit briefly, in much the same way as the words of a pilot are continually recorded and erased by a flight deck’s ‘black box’ until such time as the cycle is interrupted by intent or catastrophe.

Most recently, Birkin staged a performance-installation for Baibakov Art Projects’ Natural Wonders: New Art from London at the Red October Chocolate Factory in Moscow. CONCORD made reference to the time management studies that characterised late 19th and early 20th century experimental industrial initiatives. In 1913, Frank and Lillian Gilbreth attached light bulbs to the hands of the most efficient workers in a New England handkerchief factory and had them perform the menial tasks of their everyday routine. The workers’ movements were photographed on a camera’s long exposure, while the trails of light from each image were used to construct wire models. The less efficient workers in the factory were then made to trace their hands over these models as a means of increasing efficiency, measured in units of “Therblig”, or Gilbreth spelt backwards. For this live event, a pianist from the Moscow Conservatory sat at a piano whose strings had been cut like vocal cords. Small lights were strapped to his fingernails as he performed Charles Ives’ 1913 Concord Sonata, a groundbreaking work from the American Modernist repertoire that explores musical concord and discord. Yet all that could be heard was the dull noise of wood against felt, as the musician fingered his mute instrument and the photographer documented their impotent performance.

"Form 5, 6 & 7"

2008
Duratran print in framed lightbox, ed. 5 + 2AP
32" x 48" inches

"Form 8 & 9"

2008
Duratran print in framed lightbox, ed. 5 + 2AP
32" x 48" inches

"4 Hours"

2008
Live Performance

"Untitled" from the series Hold

2008
Duratran print in framed lightbox, ed. 5 + 2AP
32" x 48" inches

"Untitled Triptych" from the series Hold

2008
Duratran print in framed lightbox, ed. 5 + 2AP
32" x 48" inches

2007
C-type print on aluminium
40

"Untitled Diptych" from the series Confessions

2007
C-type print on aluminium
40" x 60" inches

"Untitled" from the series Confessions

2007
C-type print on aluminium
40" x 60" inches

"Untitled" from the series Confessions

2008
C-type print on aluminium
40" x 60" inches

"Concord"

2009
C-type print on aluminium
72" x 46" inches

"Sustain"

2006
C-type print on aluminium
74" x 38" inches