“Trailer: itinerary, 1998 – 2018 by work-seth/tallentire, a video performance cycle that initially unfolded over a two-week period in the form of screenings each evening, of performances that had taken place during the day, at different locations across the city of Dublin.
Trailer was originally commissioned by Project Arts Centre, Dublin’s off-site programme, curated by Valerie Connor in August 1998. During the two-week period of production Anne Tallentire and John Seth were provided with a live/work space in the Temple Bar area of the city, from where they would travel each morning to a location decided upon by a process of chance that involved devising coordinates using letters and numbers in a daily newspaper. At each site they would perform and record until mid-day, then return to the ad hoc studio they constructed in their temporary accommodation to edit the material. The completed works, produced in such an intensely concentrated timeframe, were then screened each night at ten different locations across the city. The information for locations that included an outdoor stage at local council offices, serviced art and design studios, art centre offices, fish and second-hand clothing market, private garage, city library, acting school, rental apartment designated for cultural use, property management company offices, artists’ studios were made available daily via a free phone number.
At Hollybush Gardens the 10 works that comprise Trailer: itinerary are dispersed around the gallery and placed according to another process of chance. This staging brings the material of the work together under one roof (as opposed to various city locations of Dublin). Here the temporal and geographical dislocation and play between the subjects depicted and the audience’s encounter with the work is further amplified through the relationship exchange between digital to analogue to digital, both in terms of production and the looped screening (as opposed to being seen once as an event) over the duration of the exhibtion. This work reveals the inherently reflective yet political acuity of work-seth/tallentire’s practice that seeks to formulate a working process that puts under stress the politics of action, dis- location and the work of performance. This re-working entitled Trailer: itinerary is developed anew and follows on from an earlier reworking in 2015 for STUDIO staged in two parts over two days at Hollybush Gardens. Previous versions of Trailer were included in the group exhibition 00 44,1999 which toured to PS1, New York; Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo; Ormeau Baths Gallery, Belfast; and Crawford Art Gallery, Cork.”
