Disbelief will take the form of an interactive performance, based on the morning ritual of coffee and newspapers. The work will involve conversations with visitors in relation to the media and democracy. It will also involve physically transforming newspapers.

 

The work is inspired by: 

- Sitting down and reading as a civilized gesture. Coffee and newspapers as Europhilia. The Western liberal project: education, democracy, freedom of the press.

- Who is the good citizen? Can the good citizen (always a little too good to be true) still exist in the global corporate order? If the good citizen doesn't really exist, is it just nostalgia? Voting and reading the newspaper as more of an abstract duty than a genuine participation?

- Instability presenting itself as stability, irrationality presenting itself as order

- A sense that the real crises in the world are either invisible or too obvious, too overwhelming to be newsworthy.

 

Peter Conlin works in installation, performance and text. Preoccupations include: very long walks in areas where people don't normally walk, banal 'escapist' experience (absent minded associations, day dreaming), interested in how ideas and experience are transmitted, investigating the act of exhibiting art, and exploring notions of productivity. He is presently in the MFA program at SFU.

 

Kirsten Forkert works in installation, performance and text. She has presented her work across Canada. Her work, which is often site-specific, explores our relationship to larger social and economic structures, especially as they get played out in urban space. She is also interested in questions of community, especially alternative ways of conceiving of this. Audience participation is an important part of her work.