Ulrike and Eamon Compliant

Ulrike and Eamon Compliant is a new ambulatory work exploring subjectivity in the heart of the streets, squares and churches of Venice. It invites audiences to become participants and interlocutors with the artists.

As a participant you enter Palazzo Zenobio to find a phone. Press dial and a man on a video link answers. He asks you to put on a pair of sunglasses. He guides you out of the gallery and into the city. He asks you to choose between Eamon, a Customs Agent from Northern Ireland with four children, and Ulrike, a journalist and single mother based in Berlin. As you walk you receive a number of phone calls. It becomes clear that now you are the person you have chosen. It is you who has lived under cover, who has spied, who has robbed and killed. You have made the ultimate decision to risk your life to change the world.

The experience creates a parallel and, at times, unnerving reality to the physical world through which you are walking. You may choose to empathise or to be yourself. The calm voice on the phone invites your trust.

As your story unfolds you hear of arrests and interrogations. Of loved ones who have been left behind. As your empathy grows so does your complicity in the chain of events. What recording will you make as you sit on a bench near the military school? Will you choose to pull the hidden object from the water?

As you cross the bridge, a woman calls: “If you follow the man then I know you are ready to leave everything behind.” He leads you down an alleyway through a hidden doorway for a meeting and a glimpse through the two way mirror.

Blast Theory’s projects set the stage for dialogues to become revealing, delicate and meaningful as they hover between the private space of the web page or deserted alleyway and the public space of the internet, stage or urban thoroughfare. Given Blast Theory's history of locative projects in which context, orientation, and disorientation have been so central, Venice provides a perfect opportunity for the artists to develop this practice further.

Ulrike and Eamon Compliant is a new commission curated by the De La Warr Pavilion. It seeks to profile a cutting edge and experimental cross media practice within a renowned visual arts platform, engaging new and different audiences through creative and interactive game play. It signals a strand of the Pavilion’s artistic programme that seeks to explore and expand experimental cross-media practice, where the boundaries of both gallery and auditorium are unable to respond to ideas and where the audience experience is beyond the traditions of either exhibition or live performance.

Developed with the support of the Mixed Reality Lab, University of Nottingham and made possible by the generous support of Arts Council England and Turning Point South East with the cooperation of Nuova Icona and Oratorio di San Ludovico.

Press

For press information and images, please contact Sally Ann Lycett at the De La Warr Pavilion sally.ann.lycett@dlwp.com Telephone : + 44 1424 229137, +44 (0) 7966544505

Editors' Notes

Ulrike Meinhof (1934 – 1976) was a German journalist who became notorious through her membership of the Red Army Faction. Her fraught relationship with fellow members Andreas Baader and Gudrun Ensslin may have contributed to her suicide while awaiting trial in prison in 1976.

Eamon Collins ( 1954 – 1999) was an active member of the IRA’s Nutting Squad, in charge of internal security, before becoming an informer on whose evidence large numbers of the IRA were prosecuted. He was murdered in 1999.

De La Warr Pavilion

The De La Warr Pavilion is a leading centre for contemporary art, architecture, live performance in one of the world’s finest examples of modernist architecture. The programme works nationally and internationally with artists, curators, agencies, publishers and other institutional partners. Recent projects include Grayson Perry in partnership with Southbank Centre, London and a major new sculptural commission in partnership with Haunch of Venison, Berlin by Turner Prize nominee Nathan Coley. In summer 2009 De La Warr Pavilion is presenting a major exhibition on Joseph Beuys in partnership with Tate and National Galleries of Scotland.