Barbara Kruger Twelve

Tramway is delighted to present Twelve, an installation by one of the world’s foremost contemporary artists, Barbara Kruger.

First shown at Mary Boone Gallery in New York in April 2004, Twelve is a large scale video installation of twelve short scenes, written by Kruger, performed by actors and projected on opposite sides of the space to each other. Nine of the 12 scenes occur at the same time in a dinner setting. Text scrolling along the bottom of each scene suggest the thoughts or words of the people involved.

Each scene lasts between 6 seconds to 12 minutes long and portrays discussions between groups, friends or families, which evolve into argument. As the viewer stands in the centre of the installation going on around them, they are thrust into the middle of discussions which become increasingly hostile, feeling unease at witnessing something private yet public, real yet unreal, violent orally/aurally but not physically.

Further, to coincide with Twelve, Tramway commissioned artists Belinda Guidi and James McLardy to work with a group of teenage boys from the Linthouse area of the city, in response to themes raised in Twelve.

Barry Burns, Robert Duncan and Andrew Hulley worked with the artists over a period of two months, experimenting with a range of creative processes including drawing, sculpture and film-making. Focusing on the concept of den, the group explored how lines of demarcation between the personal and the public evolve, are erased and re-made. The resulting project, With Bow and Drill, will run for the last week of the show (20 – 26 Sep).

Barbara Kruger was born in Newark, New Jersey in 1945 and now lives in New York and Los Angeles. After attending Syracuse University, she went on to study Art and Design with Diane Arbus at Parson’s School of Design in New York. Barbara Kruger’s iconic red and black text and image works, where fragments of images are overlaid with short phrases or captions, owe much to her early career in graphic design and art direction at Conde Nast Publications.

Since then, Kruger has sustained a career which spans over thirty years. Her work is included in all major collections of contemporary art throughout the world but is just as likely to be placed in non-art environments – billboards, public parks, train stations, or match boxes.

Barbara Kruger uses popular culture as both a subject and a tool in her work. Images taken from sources such as fashion magazines are juxtaposed with provocative text to criticize the very structures and values these magazines propagate. Her work poses questions, scenarios, and ideas on a range of subjects - economics, consumerism, gender politics, race, personal rights, autonomy – but all can be reduced to a simple exploration of how people function and co-exist within a hierarchical society.

“Power and its politics and hierarchies exist everywhere: in every conversation we have, in every deal we make, in every face we kiss. I try to address this power and how it choreographs the issues of violence and control, of wealth and poverty, of hope and abjection.” ( from an interview with Barbara Kruger, Amnesty, March 2005)

Pressetext

Barbara Kruger "Twelve"
Kurator: Lorraine Wilson