Gerard Byrne (Edition I)

1984 and Beyond (2005)

Gerard Byrne premiered his new film production '1984 and Beyond' at the Veenfabriek in November 2005. Byrne developed and produced this project in stages through out the year 2005 with If I Cant Dance...

In Festival a/d Werf in May, Byrne presented 'Exercise for Two Actors', a piece in which he explores the relation between spoken language and film dialogue. In Theaterfestival Boulevard, he staged a live reading of the script of '1984 and Beyond'.

'1984 and Beyond' takes the magazine Playboy as its starting point. If you were a man who lived in America in 1963, you might have read the panel discussion in playboy called 1984 and beyond, comprising a group of science fiction writers including the famous Arthur C. Clarke (author of Space Odyssey 2001) and Rod Sterling (creator of the Twilight zone). The panellists discuss how we might imagine ourselves many years from now, how we would organise society, population control, warfare, genetic modification, the future of religion and, of course, the possibility finding alien life.

Byrne re-centred the scene in the Netherlands with eleven Dutch actors. As a setting he chose two classics of Dutch Modernist architecture: Hugh Maaskant's Provinciehuis in 's-Hertogenbosch and the sculpture Pavilion of Gerrit Rietveld in the garden of the Kröller-Müller museum in Otterlo.

The architecture, costumes, furniture and indeed the Barbara Hepworth sculptures dotted around the Rietveld pavilion, further situate the scene ánd re-orient the filmed discussion both conceptually and physically. There is a certain playfulness as the artist explores the systematics of film making and acting, the credibility of transforming a magazine text into a screen play and interrogates the relationship between past, present and future... Read more