Power and Displacement Hanna Scott in conversation with Javier Téllez
In a small town, way out west, a run down cinema is seeking gold coin donations for restoration work. Everybody’s Theatre in Opunake, Taranaki, New Zealand, was, on Sunday 22nd March 2009, the location for a visceral performance piece, Intermission, in which two live lions paced the cinema while the audience was penned in a cage. This telling technique of inversion—where in this case the spectator traded roles with the subject—cues perfectly into recent works by Venezuelan born artist Javier Téllez.
Téllez describes his childhood experiences, his parents both being psychiatrists, ‘We used to go to visit my father in the hospital when we were kids. There was this amazing carnival celebration every year’. For the carnival, ‘the doctors would wear the uniforms of the patients and the patients would wear the uniforms of the doctors, and this was, kind of, my childhood. This is where I come from and I think that in a way I consider my work is an extension of these experiences’.
The lions in Intermission, Abdullah and Tshaka, develop upon this notion of the carnivalesque, the absurd. They stare through the mesh cage at the audience, more particularly at the infants in the audience, reversing their traditional role as zoo specimens. The Lions involve the audience, the participants, who have queued for several hours to see this event, in an oblique critique of spectacle. They roar. It is arresting. They are magnificent and wretched at the same time. It is confrontational—their heads and jaws loom in the confines of the small cinema. They glow golden in the heat of two spotlights. But they are so removed from an appropriate habitat that the work... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline