My work explores how histories, places, identities and communities are constructed and reconstructed, and the shifting private and public narratives that comprise and contest those constructions. I am particularly fascinated by border zones, nomanslands, translations, transitions, and the slippages where cultures intersect; security cultures, archives, architectures of democracy, and national imaginaries; places where nature and artifice imitate and influence each other; and cities in conflict and post-conflict conditions.
I work across multiple disciplines - video, sound, photography, text, installation, new media, performance and public dialogue – but all my projects share the same approach to working with narrative, documentary and hybrid modes of storytelling through both linear and interactive database forms. This means that I generally start with a central inquiry - an idea, issue, place, moment or historical narrative - and then accumulate a collection of images, video, audio, objects, texts, or other research materials that cluster around that center. The final project becomes a system for navigating the collection/database. I often make multiple interfaces to a single project database -- for example, there will be a linear video, a series of photographs, an installation that may be interactive or activated by performance, a website, and an artist’s book or critical text.
Over the past few years I have also become engaged with public dialogue, public practice, and site-specific, serial, collaborative, interactive, and community-based modes of production. Out of this interest, I have developed two ongoing collaborations. The first is Index of the Disappeared, an archive of post-9/11 disappearances and platform for public dialogue around related issues, maintained since 2004 with visual artist Chitra Ganesh. Through the Index, I have expanded my investigations into the roles played by language in defining legal rights; the connections between erasure of data and disappearances in real life; and the differences between warm and cold data. In my own series of ‘warm data’ projects, I have also developed a collective, open-ended storytelling process initiated and mediated by questions and answers -- either by asking certain questions of the community I’m working in, or the audience who encounters the work, or by offering myself as a performer to answer their questions. These personal interactions and intimate interventions are also often designed to create smaller and more specific dialogues within the context of a larger and more abstract debate.
The second ongoing collaboration is a series of videos and multimedia performances made since 2006 with choreographer Erin Ellen Kelly. Together we develop and film performances specific to both site and camera through a research process influenced by landscape archeology, and then situate those performances within larger visual, aural and temporal compositions to create more complex meditations on place, history, culture and memory. During the last year we have also been experimenting with re-translating these performances for video into live performances that incorporate elements of the videos.