Features

© Kuang yu Tsui

:: Art Sheffield 08

A new exhibition that featured at the Millennium Galleries for Art Sheffield 08 drew inspiration from the festival's title, 'Yes, No, Other Options'.

It explored ideas of how modern society measures success and failure. Paul Rooney's sound piece 'Words and Silence' focused on a fictional call centre worker, who, when a call goes to answering machine, deviates from the call centre's script and begins to tell her own story. Rooney touchingly examines our need for moments of spontaneity within our increasingly regimented working lives.

Andrew Cooke’s 'Performance Under Working Conditions' also looked at the world of the low-paid service industry worker. Cooke's disturbingly comic video of himself using his head as if it's a Hoover appears at first demeaning, but his apparent devotion to the task suggests a sense of pride, transforming it into a small act of defiance.

Cooke's 'A Guide to Maintaining Dignity in the Workplace' is a more straightforwardly humorous look at the modern worker. With headings such as 'Work Avoidance' and 'Procedural Sabotage', his guide to resisting the pressure to perform, is a celebration of the virtues of wasting time.

Humour is also key in the work of Taiwan's Kuang-Yu Tsui, whose performance video shows the artist on a madcap dash around a city, stopping frequently to put on different costumes. Kuang-Yu Tsui wittily shows how easy it has become to take on new identities, but with his ever-present backpack he is also a tourist, rushing through roles and unable to settle.

Etchells and Horvat, Insults and Praises

In 'Promises & Threats' and 'Insults & Praises', Vlatka Horvat and Tim Etchells, take turns trading insults and compliments and listing possibilities for the future. The two artists engage in a playful competitiveness, trying constantly to outdo each other, asking to what extent our options are anything more than empty phrases.

Katie Davies' '38th Parallel depicts the demilitarised zone between North and South Korea, examining a space where saying 'yes' or 'no' could have potentially disastrous consequences. It is a space of stasis and Davies' eerily still video of uniformed guards and military installations stress the sinister potential lying beneath the inactivity.

Fans of The Smiths will have appreciated Wolfgang Tillmans's image of ex-frontman Morrissey. But the photograph, taken for an American magazine, has a glossiness that sits uncomfortably with the exhibition's wider context.

There's a sense that Turner Prize winner Tillmans, whose work was prominently displayed, has been included simply to provide a big name but in general, the pieces have been selected to subtly complement the specially commissioned essay by art critic Jan Verwoert the festival is shaped around.

What is especially pleasing is the number of local artists who were represented, with Andrew Cooke, Katie Davies and Tim Etchells all based in Sheffield. 'Yes, No, Other Options' is a powerful exhibition that showed that the city not only has the vision to host relevant, cohesive contemporary art events but can also foster exciting artistic talent.