EMPTY STAGES

28TH MAY TO 31ST JULY

CARPE DIEM ARTE E PESQUISA

Digital Prints (2003-ongoing). A collaboration with Hugo Glendinning.

 

 

‘In many ways we’re tempted to think of these pictures as performance photographs, if only because looking at them seems to be so much about imagining what might take place. There are stages strewn with detritus and others that are totally clean, others occupied by materials intended for some future event and yet others stacked with items that have no obvious connection to performance at all. Looking at these images it’s all a matter of expectations – the empty stage awaiting its action, like the blank page or the empty screen of the computer awaiting words’.  Tim Etchells

‘Empty Stages’ is an on-going photographic projectby Tim Etchells and Hugo Glendinning which documents empty stages around the world, in locations that range from amateur theatres, pubs, schools, conference centres, church halls, city theatres and working men’s clubs. Through its catalogue of these temporarily deserted locations for performance, the work explores stages as spaces of imminence and expectation – inviting the viewer to imagine the different kinds of events that could take place in these locations. In Etchells’ and Glendinning’s images the charged or magical space of performance, the “other world” of the stage, is often shown with all the lights on, without mystery. Here the stage can be seen for what it is – a piece of architecture, a zone of possibility, but in the end not more and not less than a built container, a frame of variable dimensions, that is so many metres wide and so many metres deep, and so many metres high. For the exhibition at Carpe Diem, Etchells and Glendinning are adding a selection of new empty stages images take in theatres and other performance spaces in Lisbon.