Ulrike and Eamon: Compliant

It's Friday afternoon, and walking around the city of Sheffield, I stumble across an inimitable wooden box or room. There are air holes drilled into it and clipboards hanging on the side.

Curious, I approach and examine the clipboards. There are two, each of which gives a brief biography of a militant terrorist:

I am intrigued so, perhaps against my better judgement, I enter the box-room.

Inside, there is a screen on the wall showing a woman being interviewed, or perhaps interrogated. On the wall in front of me is a shelf with a mobile phone and some instructions. I follow the instructions: I pick up the phone and press the green dial button twice. It has started.

A voice on the phone asks me whether I am Ulrike or Eamon. I comply and dial 1: I am Ulrike. The voice then asks me to leave the box, telling me which direction in which to walk. I am going towards an empty office building. When I get there, I must face the doors of the office and call him back. I comply.

"Hello Ulrike, thanks for calling me back". The voice speaks directly to me. He asks me about myself: "Are you a hesitant of decisive person?" After the beep I respond "My name is Ulrike. I am a decisive person". I stand with my back to the world, looking inside the desolate office space. I feel at once absorbed in an intimate conversation with the enigmatic voice on the phone but self-conscious; back to the world I am unaware of what is happening and it makes me feel strangely vulnerable.

I move off, following the directions of the voice, but he advises "Keep your eyes open. Act natural." Between directions, the voice tells me about my life. The choices I have made. How he admires my courageousness. How I once said that to set fire to one car is a crime, but to set fire to 100 is political. How I choose to place my children in an orphanage, and how it made him wonder why I would have done so.

I am asked to make a decision. Do I want to continue walking down this street: If so stay on the line. Otherwise hang up. I comply and stay on the line. I'm involved now. I walk towards a sheltered spot, under a tree. The voice says "Pick a person on the street. Look at them. Think about their home. Think about who they love." I comply. Doing so, the way I feel about this person is hard to describe: One of the things I feel for them is a strange sadness as they walk passed me in the rain, unaware of how they absorb my thoughts.

I move off and continue on my journey. The voice directs me down a deserted alleyway.

When I reach the bottom, he asks me if I'd like to see this thing through. Am I prepared to face the questions? Or am I the type of person to run and hide? I've come this far - I stay on the line, and the voice says "Ok Ulrike, I understand, You're prepared to face the questions". I am led to a meeting point. I nod as instructed at the 'contact' and I am led to another wooden box-room.

There are two chairs, and a mirror on the wall. A man tells me to take a seat and sits down opposite me. I hadn't expected this. I don't feel prepared. But I comply.

"What would you fight for?" His eyes fix me in place.
"Personal Freedom", I mutter nervously.
"Against all odds?" "Where do you draw the line?" "What are you prepared to do for this? Could you kill in the name of personal freedom?"

It is intense. An interrogation. Finally he asks me, "Are you a hesitant or a decisive person?"
"I am Ulrike. I am a decisive person."

"Thank you" he says, and leads me out of a door on the other side of the room. He walks me around the box to a window. "Wait here" he says and leaves me. I look through the window, I realise the mirror in the box-room was a two-way mirror. Somebody was watching everything I said.

Horrified, I stand there looking in as a woman is led into the room. She sits, as I did, and the interviewer starts again:

"What would you fight for?"


('Ulrike and Eamon: Compliant' is the creation of Blast Theory, and first presented at the Venice Biennial. I saw it in Sheffield, UK as part of the Sheffield Doc/Fest)

LIES Inc.

You know an exhibition is going to be out of the ordinary when, on entry, you're greeted by a disclaimer: "Please be warned -  you enter at your own risk". There's been a lot of buzz surrounding Site Gallery's newest exhibition 'LIES Inc.', a retrospective of the work of Eva and Franco Mattes (its been touted in The Guardian and BBC). These are notoriously playful artists - 'pranksters' the BBC calls them who in The Guardian's words will be up to "some kind of no good". Controversy and intrigue are words that come to mind. Afterall, the two are known for stealing, with the help of distraction and a Swiss army knife, fragments from famous artworks by the likes of Warhol, Kadinsky, and Beuys.

The Sheffield exhibition opens with the pair's signature Catt, a sculpture which features a cat in a birdcage that Eva and Franco Mattes duped the art world with by passing it off as a work by Maurizio Cattelan. The most facinating piece exhibited in Site Gallery was, for me, a work called No Fun. No Fun exploits a live-webcam software tool called Chatroulette in which users 'gamble' by accessing and communicating with other Chatroulette users at random. When the unwitting participants click 'Next' and reach the live-feed from the camera Eva and Franco Mattes have set up, the image which greets them is that of an uncomfortably real-looking (but of course, staged) suicide. In No Fun, we can see both live feeds, the fake suicide and the different user's reactions.

I was mesmerised by No Fun, watching and listening to the other user's reactions for some time. The experience is really unsettling, not least because it exposes the immoral side to human nature (In the time I watched it, only 1 person called 911; some didn't take it seriously but most of those who did quickly disconnected, keen to alleviate themselves from the situation and any form of moral responsibility).

The other thing at 'LIES Inc.' that really got me was a new work, Plan C and the ominously named The Liquidator, described by site as a "sculptural merry-go-round". At the end of the Gallery exhbition, we saw a short film called Let Them Believe which documents the development of Plan C. In doing so, it depicts the creation of Plan C as an undercover research trip to Chernobyl, torn and shattered as it is by the 1986 nuclear disaster. According to the film, the merry-go-round was part of an amusement park being built, and was opened early so that it could be enjoyed before the world seemingly ended. Plan C itself was the recovery of a merry-go-round from the site, housed for a few short days at a secret Sheffield location as The Liquidator, the merry-go-round now regenerated or at least cobbled together from materials taken from the Chernobyl site 25 years on. And the materials themselves still hold/emit low-level radioactive charge.

To go on the merry-go-round, we had to sign a disclaimer (!) and were asked to wear Hazmat suits for protection from the radiation. Below you can see Alice, Sarah, Rob, and I all kitted up!

The ride itself was actually really fun. Who doesn't like a merry-go-round? And its location in a disused Sheffield factory by the river was beautiful - street art by Kid Acne and Emarama.

At the end of the ride, we were measured for radiation, as was the ride, with the count continuing to rise.

Plan C and The Liquidator are brilliant works of art, and so unnerving. There's something really perverse about enjoying yourself and having fun on a merry-go-round which signifies tragedy. However, with Eva and Franco Mattes' reputation, can they be trusted? Is The Liquidator really what it claims to be? Or is it another elaborate hoax, with the Let Them Believe film serving to authenticate it? Whichever it is (and I think walking the line between the two is in itself fascinating), it works to expose to us the triviality of artfans contemplating how such a work of art made them feel in the context of the horror and tragedy of Chernobyl, itself with timely parallels to recent events in Japan.

Despite, or perhaps fundamental to, the duplicitous nature of their art, Eva and Franco Mattes certainly have a serious message, and one that asks us to confront who and what we are.

(Pictures come from my iPhone and the kindness of Alison Geldart who has a very interesting blog about words here)