Roger Hiorns

The film « Benign » was made as a commission for the FRIEZE art fair in October 2005. It is based on a single monologue delivered by an actor in an unfinished play I have written of the same name, the play written over the summer of 2005. I was concerned at the time with a project I had been asked to propose for a government building in London. I was interested in the possibility of installing a daily ritual to the government building. Introducing a repetitive action. An action to be made daily, by a member of the buildings staff. The action as part of the buildings life.
The proposal was of an idiosyncratic ceremony for a contemporary government building. It was argued that the highly rational building would gain by a contemporary act of ceremony.
The daily act was open ended and secular, it did not have any basis in religion or superstition.
The ceremony more as an act of human compulsion. The building would be introduced to a kind of obsessive compulsion. As the building was the British Home Office, it seems natural that it would develop some trait of those it represented.
At this time I wrote the monologue featured in « Benign ». It followed my interest in the ideas of compulsion, transgression and the suspicion of the collective. The narrative once separated from the play became a « grey poem » an intense hypersensitive body of words describing an act by a group against the individual. Describing a benign ceremony devoid of superstition or religion. The description of a pointless act of human compulsion. A lack of self awareness as a symptom of the collective.

The passive subjects have absorbed the idea of progress to such a degree of pacified banality that they cease to comprehend any notion of challenge or disruption. The piece explores ideas of ceremony, consumption, design, acceptance, decay and criticality.

It seemed relevant to show with the film a work first proposed in Hans Ulrich Obrist's book « DO IT ». I proposed the simple action of grinding the metal engine bearings from a passenger aircraft into a fine powder. A fistful of powder was to be scattered into any place of focus. The powder will eventually oxidise and remain as a stain. The stain, a memory of the aircraft, its decay, and a memory of extreme personal experience.
A final third work will be shown that has not yet been made at the time of writing this.

Roger Hiorns