Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard
Silent Sound

15 September - 26 November 2006

Forsyth and Pollard are collaborative visual artists who work with live art, film and video, and are pioneers in establishing re-enactment as an artistic genre. Recent pieces have seen them re-making a video from 1973 by Vito Acconci, replacing Acconci with Plan B, a young MC signed to 679 Recordings, and updating the aesthetic to reflect contemporary urban music videos. Another recent video work, File Under Sacred Music is a re-make of the infamous bootleg of The Cramps performing at Napa State Mental Institute in 1978, made in association with the ICA and BBC.

Silent Sound was an ambitious new commission by Forsyth and Pollard and saw them joining forces with Jason Spaceman, the singer, guitarist and writer in Spiritualized and formerly Spaceman 3 who wrote a new instrumental piece for the project. Silent Sound was a ground-breaking collaboration, combining the performance strategies at the heart of Forsyth and Pollard's practice and Spaceman's progressive approach to making moving, expansive soundscapes.

Silent Sound is a potent hybrid of contemporary art, music and psychological experimentation, and employs stylistics, languages and techniques from Victorian séance, Spiritualism and early 1970s performance. As with previous works by Forsyth and Pollard, it taps into the potential of music to communicate emotively, but in a move to resolve a more resonant and powerful impact, it attempts to employ the audience's mind, imagination and beliefs as a site for the work. Silent Sound invited audiences to open themselves up to the possibility that the artists might be able to transmit meaning to them without the intermediary of words, by repeatedly embedding a subliminal message within an instrumental composition.

Silent Sound took place in three stages: an initial live performance to an invited audience in Liverpool and a subsequent audio/visual installation in The Blade Factory at Greenland Street. Forsyth and Pollard are also working on producing a limited edition DVD which documents the making and staging of the project.

Silent Sound CD
A limited edition signed CD of the performance is available to order
at www.silentsound.info

Talk
21st October - 3pm
Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard in conversation with Ceri Hand -
Director of Exhibitions of FACT, Liverpool

Commission supported by:
Arts Council North West, The Wellcome Trust and PRS Foundation for New Music

Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard
Silent Sound Instillation , 2006
Photograph by Andy Stagg

Performance Production Still , 2006
Photograph by Ann Worthington

Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard
Portrait of the artists, July , 2006
? Alison Wonderland
Courtesy: A Foundation