Marina Vischmidt wrote in her Art Agenda review of ‘Fences Make Senses’ and ‘Basement Pool’: The two videos combine into a melancholy survey of the “immunity complex”(2) of the Western body politic, a helpless self-regard which is actively hostile to the public’s own survival. By locating this nihilism in the chirpy tones of everyday inertia and the popular perception that this is a crisis too large for anyone to grasp, Barber commits to a high-stakes play in which the trivial and the tragic, the crude and the tender, are too entangled to defend their own borders.”
The research question in ‘Fences Make Senses’ is; can video art transpose the plight of refugee and re-stage that plight with improvisers who are clearly not refugees? The research employs improvisers to act out the situations refugees regularly face. e.g. not having the right papers, trying to buy boats. The research destabilises the endless cliches of news items and documentaries and attempts to incorporate the indifference in the video’s form. To do this re-enactment might seem distasteful yet only mirrors the widespread indifference.
‘Basement Pool’ furthers this but by flipping it to the other extreme; an introvert who is worried that he will become more superficial if he allows his richer neighbours to build their proposed basement pool/gym next door. He worries that having his neighbours working out and worrying about their bodies will infect his home. He decides to object to their plans.
The research is about using art to highlight how unfeeling and uncaring we are; in a context of ample news footage of sinking boats, drowning migrants etc. The research is also about the video medium which paradoxically helps this process and deadens our reactions.
The show received a very good review from Art Agenda; the reviewing section of E-Flux.
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