Marking the opening of the exhibition James Richards: Our Friends in the Audience, the one-off evening of video and live music introduces a number of protagonists as emotional, narrative, and visual projections rather than contained personas. Using voice, disguise, puppetry, and direct address, they invite us to engage with the unpredictable and haunting interplay of memory and phantasy.

Marguerite Duras, Les Mains Négatives, 1979, 35mm, colour, sound, 14:00 mins

Shot just before dawn and uniquely composed of traveling shots, the film is a slow advance from Paris de la Republique to the Champs Élysées. The agonising moan of Amy Flammer’s violin score mingles with the cries of love emitted from Marguerite Duras on the soundtrack. Destined for the first prehistoric men who pressed their painted hands on cave walls, but also calling out to the marginalised population of dropouts, outcasts, and migrants. (B. Sarrut)

Alexey Kokhanov, Oslo Solo: Marioupol, 2024, performance, 15:00 mins

How to express yourself when you’re lost for words? Taking inspiration from Duras, Munch and black metal, Alexey’s new performance reflects on the act of screaming as a mode of emotional expression.

Tolia Astakhishvili, Which Bitch is a Witch?, 2000, digitised VHS video, colour, sound, 2:44 mins

Which Bitch is a Witch? is part of an ongoing project in which Astakhishvili imagines a haunted school inhabited by ghosts and demons. Related to these spectral inhabitants’ existences are a number of props, objects and ephemera in a wide-range of media. Astakhishvili’s video offers itself as an educational tool for the school’s living pupils, helping them decipher how the witches who haunt the halls disguise themselves.

Mary Helena Clark, Orpheus (outtakes), 2012, 16mm, b/w, sound, 6:00 mins

Using footage from Cocteau’s Orphée, Mary Helena Clark optically prints an interstitial space where the ghosts of cinema lurk beyond and within the frames. (Andrea Picard)

Jordan Strafer, SOS, 2021, HD video, color, sound, 11:08 mins

Jordan Strafer’s SOS interweaves fantastical scenes with the artist’s autobiography to address themes of human cruelty, power, and futility. The work cycles through scenes of night and day, with dolls as protagonists: a girl seemingly stranded on a snowy beach, an elderly man on a medical stretcher, and two EMTs who attend to him. Strafer employs strategies of doubling, interchangeability, and scale shifts, with large hands occasionally swooping down to animate, caress, and bathe the dolls—perhaps in acts of care and/or control.

Tolia Astakhishvili & James Richards, I Remember (Depth of Flatten Cruelty), 2023, HD video, colour, sound, 10:00 mins

I Remember (Depth of Flatten Cruelty) is a collaborative work by Tolia Astakhishvili and James Richards drawing on an ongoing visual dialogue between the two artists. CGI renderings of abandoned hallways, paired with holiday snapshots and paraphernalia draw a strangely depersonalized, apocalyptic landscape of emotional human debris and attachment. The soundtrack, developed with composer Max Bloching, incorporates music and field recordings that both reinforce and undermine the movements of the projected images.

I Remember (Molly Drake), performed by Alexey Kokhanov, 2:00 mins

Read more about the exhibition here

Welcome to a conversation with James Richards on Saturday April 13th, 2 pm.