LINDA DUVALL AND PETER KINGSTONE / EXHIBITION AND ARTIST TALK / LIVING IN 10 EASY LESSONS

Opening reception : Wednesday, November 6, 2013

17h

Living in 10 Easy Lessons is the title of a video project by the artists Linda Duvall and Peter Kingstone, who collaborated on a series of interviews with street-involved women. Using a minimalist and sensitive documentary approach, the two artists shot, in black and white, a series of encounters in a neutral, uncontrived space. This is where these women conveyed to Linda Duvall or Peter Kingstone ten skills they had learned on the ground over time. Point by point, they indicate what you must and must not do; for example, sell drugs, simulate a sexual act, solicit money or dodge a threat. For most of these women, acquiring these skills is a question of survival.

The installation Living in 10 Easy Lessons, which also includes photographic prints and a booklet, gives rise to an ambiguous feeling on several levels. In the first place through the reversal of values that occurs in it, as the skills taught are usually hidden, secret and seen as taboo. Authority is also destabilised, because here the normally marginalised subject becomes the instructor. Through this project, the artists seek to break with the institutionalised model which distinguishes between those who dispense knowledge and those who receive it, confronting us with our prejudices. The project also poses the question of the various forms that the documentary approach can take in an artistic practice which maintains ties with sociology. As Cheyanne Turions, an independent curator who has written on this video project, has remarked, when we watch this work it becomes our responsibility to participate in this necessary change of social paradigm in order to acknowledge the vulnerability that these women reveal.

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Artist presentation + bring your lunch on Friday, November 8 at 12:00 noon (in English)

As part of the exhibition LIVING IN 10 EASY LESSONS, Sporobole invites you to a presentation by artists Linda Duvall and Peter Kingstone.