Newsroom, 2008

‘The Greenroom: Reconsidering the Documentary and Contemporary Art’, Hessel Museum of Art, CCS Bard, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY, curated by Maria Lind

Newsroom is an installation made in response to the themes of ‘The Green Room’, which focused on the diverse approaches to documentary in contemporary art practices and offered a critique of the mainstream media’s representation of reality. In the middle of the Hessel Museum, the viewer encountered a television studio where lectures, screenings, seminars, performances and panel discussions took place. This seductive social space was situated on a raised platform and filled with soft carpeting, colourful screens, cubes used as seating and a conversation pit. Dispensing with the traditional architecture of the lecture theatre, the space was arranged so that the speakers and audience sat together ‘in the round’. The usual hierarchy, in which a lecturer stands at a lectern in front of a room full of silent listeners, was replaced by a situation in which everyone was equally ‘on display’. Speakers and visitors found themselves cast as performers in the space, as a television presenter or a member of the studio audience. The work station behind the scenes was also on show, suggesting the presence of support staff and technicians, who would usually be invisible to the television viewer.