- Venue
- Tether Studios
- Location
- East Midlands
‘Murder in the Kremlin’ is an all-encompassing multilayered installation based experience, ‘a tale of espionage, paranoia and death.’ For the third show in their season of exhibitions, Tether have transformed their entire studio and gallery space into what can only be described as an abandoned film set or crime scene. It is unlike anything I have ever seen in an art context, crosshatching lasers, smoke, secret rooms and a life-size cardboard bunker, not to mention mysterious foreign papers, unrecognisable maps, and a crackly projection of a Russian.
On entering, the viewer immediately becomes part of the scenario; you are no longer an observer, but a participant. Baffled and confused, you find yourself looking through an array of different spaces, searching documents, dodging lasers, trying to piece together this unfathomable world. The whole experience is very strange. Tether provide their audience with only a select amount of information; you are literally thrown into the middle of something you know nothing about, and seemingly can’t find anything about either. It is frustrating. But this is the pull this piece has.
In one sense you want more information, you want Tether to have made more secret areas: a secret hatch under the fabricated stairs, some letters slotted through the floorboards, a key that can be used to translate the odd codes that are written about. Why can’t we know?
On the other hand, if that information was available, where would the engagement be? The beauty of this show is that it requires us, the viewer, to formulate what we want it to be. Tether supplies a handful of data to provoke the use of our imagination, which in turn leads to being caught in a blur of the imaginary and the real.
Because you are in an art context, you know the whole environment is a fabrication. Yet this knowledge conflicts with the real excitement and intrigue felt. The viewer becomes caught in a moment of suspended disbelief, they are part of something that they know isn’t real, yet the emotions the environment evokes are, which leaves you feeling you are part of another world right up until your departure.
A good example of this can be found in the dark backroom behind the bunker. Here there are four videos of four men just looking, eyes switching left to right, back and forth. This is an unnerving piece, firstly because it adds to the broken narrative – are these men responsible for this scenario, or, are they victims? It’s all left up to us to decide. And what are they looking at? Each other? And why does it feel sometimes that they are looking at you? The way it’s displayed works – the videos, whilst being separate, interact with each other and the viewer, enhancing the feeling of unease. It’s as though the footage is transcending space and time, really blurring reality and fiction. You know its fiction, yet the feelings are real.
The whole installation/experience completely challenges our perceptions; of the world, the information we see, what’s real, what’s fiction. How can we know the truth? What defines reality – our mind, our surroundings, or both?
Sustaining a concept whilst making art that is accessible, fun and multilayered is a difficult balance to achieve. However, Tether continually manage to do this, and ‘Murder in the Kremlin’ doesn’t disappoint.
