Janine Antoni

Building on the success of the discussion that took place during our recent archive season, inIVA is proud to present the UK premiere of an intimate video work by the mixed-media performance artist Janine Antoni, whose work uses the domestic space as a site to explore folklore and the process of video documentary.

Ready or Not, Here I Come was made by Antoni in 1994 and has been described by the writer Marina Warner as a piece which, reminiscent of the films of David Lynch, 'captures the scary thrill of a common childhood game'. Antoni herself describes the video as exploring the 'psychological space you feel when you're being hunted'.

Throughout the film, Antoni's father hunts for her as she hides in various spaces within the family home. We sense his increasing frustration and tension in the final search of the film which lasts much longer.

Ready or Not, Here I Come is a rare family collaboration and can be seen as part of a series of seminal works that Antoni made involving her parents, such as the famous photographic piece Mom and Dad (also 1994). Yet it is also a piece about the spectacle of performance. Antoni deploys a fly-on-the-wall documentary technique to film a performance in which the body and the environment in which it is viewed create a landscape in which to explore and contest different subjectivities.

Born in the Bahamas and now living in New York City, Antoni has been internationally acclaimed for her distinctive performative object pieces and for the unusual materials she deploys to recast the aesthetic and cultural meaning of sexual difference. Pressetext

Janine Antoni