Statement | Bio | Archive
STATEMENT
I am a London based artist concerned with issues surrounding recent political protest and forms of autonomous subcultural uprising (such as Hip Hop and Rave cultures) and their subsequent media dissemination and forms of recuperation. My work traverses video scratch collage, installation and interventionist performance, utilizing alter egos, the grotesque, and cartoonist parody as tools to comment on the erosion of the authentic and in particular, riot as spectacle. The video ‘Riot’ was produced after experiencing the G20 demonstrations against the financial system at the grandiose location of the bank of England in 2008 as the world economy began to collapse into recession. The demonstration seemed like a hyped up, stadium scale spectacle on a film set. Forward intelligence police teams were monitoring and recording activists who were in turn recording police, creating an endless impotent loop of documentation whilst the ominous drone of surveillance helicopters overhead provided the backing soundtrack. ‘Riot’ addresses the history and contemporary state of protest and represents the endless cycle of civil unrest that is experienced second hand through the media’s lens in a re-enforcement of diffused aggression and passivity. The idea behind the video has been developed into large scale performance riots (Chamber music for the disenfranchised & Prague Uprising) where assembled crowds are encouraged to actively participate in engaging physically with footage of riots in a contained institutional location, to a live punk soundtrack. CAREER SYNOPSIS After graduating from Goldsmiths MA in Fine Arts, Milne was entered into the European wide Start Point prize on the strength of his video and performance piece Riot, and went on to win the overall prize in the Czech Republic at GASK resulting in his first solo show at GAVU Cheb in 2011. His video work was selected by Elizabeth Price for the Selected Tour and screened Jobseekers at the Whitechapel Gallery in 2012. Seminal collage video artist George Barber curated Milne’s video work The Delinquents in Reality Check, a South London Gallery Screening in 2012 which also appeared in Moscow International Biennale for Young Art 2012. Milne also curated Bunker Mentality, a video collage exhibition in a disused 2nd World War Bunker which included Riot Act SE6, a live performance recreation of Crimewatch footage from the 2011 London riots. In 2013 Milne’s video performance installation piece Your Eyes Are Dead was shown at The International Film Festival Rotterdam in conjunction with Joey Ramone Gallery. He went on to develop the piece for The Hecklers exhibition at New Art Gallery Walsall in 2013 and then had a month long residency at The Barbican with performance collective, The Cult of RAMMELLZEE (Featuring Alexis Milne, Tex Royale, Nuke Eden, Lu Ma Itri Oi, Eve Fainke, Chooc Ly Tan) in August 2013 as part of Hack The Barbican and made large scale collaborative performances featuring The House of Sequana, artist/rapper Infinite Livez, and electronica musicians Carbon Paycheque and Artificial Arm. From 2014-2015 The Cult Of RAMMELLZEE continued to perform large scale immersive rituals at artist run spaces such as The Gasworks, DIG space, The Pumphouse (a squatted museum in Greenwich) and at institutes such as Modern Art Oxford, Somerset House and also at The Saatchi Gallery. In 2015 Milne also curated Cult Of The Concrete an exhibition at Joey Ramone gallery in Rotterdam. Recent press coverage can be viewed at this link below
'
|
