Institute of Contemporary Arts

Andrew Hunt's weekend event with Erik Blinderman and Michael Eddy, Jonty Lees + Alastair MacKinven will be in the Upper Gallery on Saturday 12 and Sunday 13 July.

Invited artists Erik Blinderman and Michael Eddy, Jonty Lees, and Alastair MacKinven are presenting a two-day project centred on the contemporary relationship between performance and photography. While the ICA's Upper Galleries are being used primarily as an exhibition space, performances are taking place off-site throughout the weekend. In the history of performance art, individual works have traditionally been presented as a mechanical sequence of events: from the site and time of an original action, to its documentation, critical evaluation and – as sometimes happens with seminal works – subsequent reenactment. This problematic chronology serves to canonise a performance work within the field of historical discourse. For Nought to Sixty's event, however, the selected artists are attempting to skew and disrupt the logical progression of performance and time through combining new photographic documentation, props, projections and films with off-site performances and performative installations. The artists are aiming to present alternative readings of an 'original' event.

Alastair MacKinven, who participated in Nought to Sixty in May with an installation comprising paintings and sculptural objects, will this time pursue the performative aspect of his practice. For his performance, Time Shifter, Sailor Killer, Moth Fucker, MacKinven will visit the Royal Observatory in Greenwich on the evening of Friday July 11. The observatory projects a laser at zero degrees longitude, representing the path of the Prime Meridian – the international timeline. MacKinven's action at this site will be documented and the resulting footage shown in the ICA Upper Galleries for the rest of the weekend. Presented alongside the video, an incongruous prop used at Greenwhich will be wedged into the same space, referring as much to Charlie Chaplin's precarious walking cane or W.C. Fields' absurd billiard cue, as to Robert Smithson's mirror displacement.

Artists Erik Blinderman and Michael Eddy who recently studied at the Städelschule in Frankfurt, create films that deal with mirrors, refl ection and refraction in time-based work. For the Nought to Sixty weekend, the artists are presenting a 16mm film installation in which two films they produced independently are projected. Blinderman's film, made using a deceptively angled 'spy camera' built by the artist, engages the history of artists' surveillance – especially the work of Walker Evans, Henri Cartier Bresson and Gordon Matta-Clark – with the goal of constructing an 'indirect cinema'. Eddy's film, made using a camera fitted with a magnifying glass that burns holes through and into its subject, questions the notion that the camera is a neutral gatherer of information.

Jonty Lees plans to produce numerous works for this weekend exhibition. His irreverent array of ideas – which Martin Clark and Michael Archer documented for the artist's 2007 Tate St Ives residency – have been pushed forward to include the site of the ICA as their starting point. Lees is using the larger of the Upper Galleries to present an installation of performance and still imagery, which again refers to actions beyond this space. Lees' series of sonic interventions reference legendary producers such as Joe Meek and Martin Hannet (and their ingenuous experiments with noise), while interfering with the ICA's building in an impish manner. An inaugural meeting of the Artists' Cycling Club will also occur within the ICA on Sunday, while the local area beyond the building will similarly become sites for the initiation of playful actions, both visible and veiled.

Andrew Hunt

Watch footage of the Artists' Cycling Club in action.

Nought to Sixty in pictures: Artists' Cycling Club