Performance in response to – and in the context of – Duane Hanson’s exhibition at Serpentine North Gallery. Two women are engaged in a casual dialogue that seems to echo their surroundings, pointing at some sinister realities hidden in plain sight. Are the women really ‘all there’? Are they headed to the slag heap? Are they more like Sandra Bullock in Gravity or like Robert Redford in All is Lost? As they try to piece together an image of something that took place from increasingly macabre fragments of stories, the women keep ignoring a silent man sharing the space with them. As the repressed begins to return, in physical form, a doubt is introduced as to the sincerity of the women’s efforts to recall. Using the actors’ bodies in relation to the simultaneously life-like, yet tangibly inanimate, out of time people in Hanson’s work, shifting hierarchies of subject- and objecthood emerge between the sculptures, the two women and the speechless man.

Performed by Hanna Harlyn, Zoë Hunter and Frazer Blaxland

Documentation film of the performance. Camera by Matthew Noel-Tod, edited by Maija Timonen:

Serpentine Galleries – Saturdays Live: Maija Timonen, The Only Living Boy from Serpentine Galleries on Vimeo.

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