Vehicle

7 April - 5 May 2001

Vehicle is a new collaboration between artists of Simon Aeppli and David Collins. Their working practice is informed by cinema and performance, referencing investigative processes such as surveillance, detection and forensic testing. For this month-long exhibition they will draw upon the City of Cardiff to direct the work, operating from the gallery and a motorcar twenty-four hours a day.


‘Prior to these journeys the car will be examined and analysed and finally cleaned away, providing a new space in which ‘Vehicle’ begins to happen. This systematic approach allows us to decode the car's environment in order to collect and study the minutiae and to gain an understanding of the physical space and its immediate history.’

Vehicle will be fast changing with the artists and their debris coming to and leaving the gallery. In a stark and revealing process, Aeppli and Collins will use the vehicle to trawl the City, scraping away at the surface and seeing what lies beneath.

‘We will visit uninhabited sites - dead zones. These parts of the city often exist, rather like the people who are attracted to them, on the fringes. Society has either taken away their identity or rejected them.’

Vehicle reveals the mundane everyday of the City to be far more unsettling, sinister and paranoid. The viewer is left with the uneasy feeling that this moment is merely a representation of a darker narrative. Their journeys out from the centre of Cardiff (g39) to the fringes of the city will be documented on video as surveillance footage. The gallery becomes a point of intersection for these forays, a place to show as well as conceal. g39 will act as a base, living quarters, a centre of operation to analyse documentary surveillance footage and store evidence.

Programme