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Review Apr 16 2009 « | »
Triple Bill at Shunt Vaults (Tears of Eros | The Modes of Al-Ikseer | Listen, My Secret Fetish) In this slow-paced Triple Bill of solo performances setting the artists' bodies within haunting soundscapes, Shunt Vaults is gradually......

Agnieszka Gratza

In this slow-paced Triple Bill of solo performances setting the artists' bodies within haunting soundscapes, Shunt Vaults is gradually recovering from 'Visions of Excess', a twelve-hour feast of live art at its most daring displayed there on April 12th.

The evening gets off to a fine start with Carla Esperanza Tommasini's eerily beautiful 'Tears of Eros'. Covered from head to toe in gold paint, the body-turned-sculpture starts crawling towards us down a long band whose metallic silver sheen off-sets its golden hue. The erotic charge of the piece is progressively diffused as the taut golden body unfolds before our eyes revealing its innermost recesses, down to the inside of its gaping mouth - obscenely red.

Each piece has its own designated performance space; at Shunt Vaults you are spoilt for space. For the next show we proceed to the adjacent room strewn with cushions for all to sit on. But Richard Hayes's 'Listen, My Secret Fetish' makes for anything but comfortable viewing. The four 'sound pieces' for clarinet, saxophone and bass drum - relentless by dint of repetition - are performed in different parts of the room by Hayes, donning a different garb each time in varying degrees of nudity.

Things pick up again (though not in pace) with 'The Modes of Al-Ikseer'. A square pool filled to the brim with a dubious-looking substance giving off a rancid smell is how Harminder Singh Judge imagines the ocean of milk out of which the world was created according to Hindu myth. Clad in a sarong and looking the part of an oriental sage, the artist rotates on its surface achingly slowly, letting the message scrawled in neon letters appended to his waist ('Pick up the receiver and I'll make you a believer') sink in bit by bit until it erupts into the blasting lyrics of Depeche Mode's 'Personal Jesus'.

Triple Bill was performed on April 13th and 14th at Shunt Vaults as part of the Spill Festival, April 2 to 23. Click here for the programme.

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