you've asked me to tell you about my biography and I know it's the format of
the films and I know that you want that because it shapes me in the minds of
others so they can have a deeper understanding of the causes that make me
who I am but I don't really believe in those causes necessarily. I had a very
troubled relationship to the idea of what the photograph does. When I was at
art school I was interested in what it did to the female body and what females
did with their bodies and so I'd made these photographs where I turned myself
into a vase, probably quite pornographic in itself
because I had flowers coming out of my vagina and I was kind of stood on my
head and to me it was a parody of this objectification, but what happened
with those photographs was that when I showed them to people they said
they were beautiful and then I realized that you can't really critique, well for me, you
can't really critique something from within it, in a sense that you fall into
all the same traps, so say you do something ironic about fascism, a fascist
may find it rather wonderful so I thought I needed to rethink the
relationship between the subject and the object in photography and so if I was
the camera then there's no dislocation
the idea that when I decided that I would turn myself into a camera it was using
my mouse as a camera. If I just form my lips into the shape of a kiss there is
a fuzzy image of you now on the back of my throat, because that is
it's just like the eye, you know, as soon as you have the aperture it'd be a bit out of
focus, you'd be upside down and I'd be about to swallow you, so it's like an act
of cannibalism in a sense. I'd put on this big black sack and then I'd have these
little bits of photographic paper that I'd cut. So I'd put them in and so I take
the sack off, once I'd done that you know the image will be falling into my mouth
and then I could... if it was black and white
I'd have the chemical jars and I could just produce them on sight and see
what I was getting and get out and do more. Knowing that was quite exciting, I
saw it as a kind of alchemy I suppose of a moment
so I'd have a black body bag I'd have my mouth gagging and of drooling trying to
keep this paper in place... a little bit painful
I'd be removing this sack on the ground and I'd be lying there still, almost as
if dead, then it did feel quite depressing and
melancholic as an activity so I felt like I needed some assistance, you know, I
needed I needed some friends to come with me, so I made this ventriloquist
dummy, she's an automaton so when you stand in
front of her her mouth drops open and she just 'flash' takes a photograph of you and
she's got you, then I would put all those photographs on the walls of the gallery
as they went along, always rather intriguing what people would do, like flash or
go and get their child and hold them up or back of their head or 'f*** off' or whatever
and in a sense they made... she made them perform in a particular way to her
children are terrified of this work for some reason I thought they would
generally find it entertaining but they are absolutely terrified and in general
people are quite frightened by this ventriloquist and they're so, they're so
not real that it's amazing how powerful they are as a sort of strange totem
'Extramission' - the title of that piece of work comes from an idea that
the Egyptians had that what we see is projected out of our eyes onto the world
not that it falls into our eyes, the idea that the world isn't a given that just
falls into us but that we shape it through our own thoughts and
consciousness that seems like an obvious thing. This building is a model, a giant
cardboard model of the first building that was made as a dedicated filming
studio to make films in, so the first film studio, in some ways this stands as
a temple between the death and the life of the captured image but I wanted to
map that one to my own biography, so the melancholia of my feeling about
childhood my inability to speak, being mute as a child for quite some time and
so I decided to go back to Mauritius as an adult with my mother ,I'd grown up in
Mauritius, to see if it would unlock something and made this film that's
almost in the style of a documentary. 'Go to the beach and I called them over and
said look at these lovely photographs and Nancy turned around and said "is that
me" I was absolutely amazed, I hadn't heard her speak ever.' When I'm making
these works they are in theatrical settings but with a cinematic element to
try and get this hybridity between cinema and theatre and our emotional and
ethical position in relation to them. I suppose one has to accept that truths
are contingent on the shape of many things but in an artwork I'm looking for
the truth within the person, they might not be telling me a true story and the
way in which stories can function as deeper truths. For me when I'm meeting an
artwork I feel like I'm accessing the consciousness of a person who's put that
sign there for me to read and I'm looking for the mind of the person who
is trying to tell me something about the relationship between mind and matter and
what that truth is can be quite profound for us