Quattro Minuti di Mezzogiorno 

Joint work with Elaine Shemilt. Exhibited in Fuoriluogo 15 – Una Regressione Motivata, Limiti Inchiusi Arte Contemporanea, Campobasso, Molise, Italy. December 18 – January 23. Exhibition included work by Fausto Colavecchia (IT), Douglas Gordon (GB), and was curated by Deirdre MacKenna, Director of Stills – formerly Director of Stills in Edinburgh and now Director of Cultural Documents. Subsequently exhibited in Dall’oggi al domani. 24 ore nell’arte, MACRO, Museo d’Arte Contemporanea di Roma 2016.

Filmed in the town of Venafro, in Molise, Quattro Minuti di Mezzogiorno (2010), a monitor-based video and sound installation by Stephen Partridge and Elaine Shemilt, employs a fixed camera position which at first frustrates before revealing the very immediacy of its story. At the announcement of midday, the many church bells of Venafro compete in succession for almost 240 seconds and we realise that we can no longer trust technologies as there is in fact, no single moment of midday. Partridge and Shemilt have collaborated for over ten years working with film, video, sound and installation, exploring and deconstructing systems of language in order to reveal their structures and suggest possibilities which may arise from them. The sound from Quattro Minuti di Mezzogiorno resonates throughout all the spaces within the gallery, pervading our reading of each work and the picture we construct as a whole, gently undermining the very measurement of Time and in doing so, the institutions that profess to announce it. – Deirdre MacKenna