Biography

Iain Forsyth & Jane Pollard met and began working collaboratively at Goldsmiths, graduating together in 1995. They are perhaps best known for their recreations of cultural and art historical events and documents. Theirs is an enquiry into the mechanics of liveness, repetition, mediation and reception.

They have pioneered the use of re-enactment within visual art, from The World Won’t Listen, their first ‘ready-made’ live project in 1996 to their critically acclaimed A Rock ‘N’ Roll Suicide (1998), a painstakingly faithful re-staging of David Bowie’s final performance as Ziggy Stardust 25 years after the original event. Through these early live projects they harnessed the past as a present act to reframe contemporary culture; a double-exposure of then and now. Then, in 2003, they consolidated the live side of their practice with their video work for the first time in File under Sacred Music, a remake of an infamous bootleg video of a performance by the The Cramps at Napa State Mental Institute, California in 1978. They meticulously re-staged this performance with an audience from local mental health arts organisations, in order to re-shoot each pan, tilt, zoom and jitter of the original document.

While making re-enactments they began to discuss their work borrowing terms from the language of Spiritualism, describing the work as a ‘medium’ to ‘channel’ the ‘spirit’ of a past event. Researching séances and other forms of Victorian public performance with their eccentric mix of religion, science, magic and music sparked a renewed enthusiasm for large-scale live work. The result was Silent Sound, commissioned by A Foundation and presented during the 2006 Liverpool Biennial. It is one of their most ambitious projects to date. Drawing on psychological and parapsychological research, they staged an otherworldly experiment using mind control technology to transmit a subliminal message during a live music performance. This uniquely emotive experience features an original score by Jason Pierce from the band Spiritualized. It was re-presented as an installation at Art Basel Miami Beach in 2007 where it was described as “one of the fair’s biggest word-of-mouth hits” by the New York Times. The performance was restaged in 2010 as a highlight of the AV Festival in the UK.

Music is a potent mnemonic device in their work. It’s used as a form of time-travel, to derail the conscious mind and bring the past flooding into the present. This is central to an ongoing series of works, Precious Little in which they portray young people talking directly to the camera about homemade mixtapes, love and loss in a fast-paced single schizophrenic monologue. This bold take on documentary led to them being awarded the 2008 Great North Run Moving Image Commission, to make Run For Me, applying the same technique to participants and spectators of the run. In 2009 they were invited by Nick Cave to produce Do you love me like I love you, a series of 14 films, each to accompany the remastered releases of his 14 albums. These works create a portrait of each album, personified through the stories and intonation of the people who have loved and lived them.

Since 2005 Forsyth & Pollard have pursued an ongoing series re-working seminal video and performance art of the 60’s and 70’s. The first in the series, Walking After Acconci (Redirected Approaches), is a re-working of Vito Acconci’s Walk-Over (1973). Exploring the parallel they observed between the conspiratorial use of the camera in Acconci’s work and the language of urban music videos, they cast a young rapper, Plan B, and worked closely with him to update the script. Following the musical tradition of ‘answer songs’, they delivered an ‘answer piece’, Walking over Acconci (Misdirected Reproaches), with Miss OddKidd, a young female MC. In 2007 for Jarvis Cocker’s Meltdown Festival they reinterpreted Bruce Nauman’s Art Make-Up (1968) as Kiss My Nauman, replacing the artist with Dressed To Kill, the word’s longest running Kiss tribute band. And in addressing Dan Graham’s Performer/Audience/Mirror for a 2009 Site Gallery commission they produced Performer. Audience. Fuck Off. in which they issued TV and radio presenter Iain Lee with Graham’s instructions but tasked him to approach it using the dynamics of stand-up comedy.

For Radio Mania: An Abandoned Work, commissioned in 2009 by BFI, they created a multi-screen 3D video installation with ambisonic 3D sound and a cast including Kevin Eldon, Caroline Catz, Terrence Hardiman and Fenella Fielding. The work positioned the viewer in a stereoscopic limbo, transporting them into the centre of an endlessly looping rehearsal of a fictional reworking of a 3D science fiction film from 1922. Crossing the illusion of cinema with the presence of theatre the work conjured up a psychological, conceptual and physical state between reality, artifice and hallucination.

In 2011 their first major exhibition in London was presented at the South London Gallery. PUBLICSFEAR brought together a collection of sound and video works exploring ideas around both being part of and/or observing an audience. They were nominated for the Samsung Art+ Prize in January 2012.

Their work is included in collections worldwide including the Tate Gallery and Zabludowicz Collection.