"A sense of unease: a tincture of wonder in a pint of distrust"

Matt's Gallery has commissioned sixteen nights of durational performance by Brian Catling that will take place between 1 and 16 October 2005 from 6pm until midnight.

Brian Catling will perform in an interior that will be constructed in the space in the weeks leading up to the exhibition. This installation will be a series of large wooden platforms and walkways, and an isolated stage-like island. The audience will enter via a raised narrow platform that frames the room, giving an elevated view onto the central well where most of the performance will occur.

A series of carefully made instruments and sculptural devices will give detail to the room. They will include a pulpit, a pendulum, a mechanical ivory ribcage, a pearly-king dunce cone, a cooking stove, a wooden great coat; a cloak of hinges and varnished shards. Catling will operate these objects during the six hours each evening. He and some of the machines may appear to be on the same circuit, sharing moments of activity and stasis. He will also interact with the audience as they peer down into the square pit where he is contained.

Antix will be created by the room divining the actions and the actions explaining the room. Many of them are not yet known, and will not be until after it is all over.

Matt’s Gallery has worked with Brian Catling on a number of occasions: Lair (installation and publication) 1987; At the Lighthouse (durational performance and installation at Trinity Buoy Wharf) 1991; Soundings: A Tractate of Absence (publication) 1991; and Were (durational performance) 1998. The Cutting, a narrative video film made with Tony Grisoni, will premiere later this year. Catling was the founder of The Wolf In The Winter; an international performance group who have toured in Germany, Spain, Scotland and Greenland, and will come to the South London Gallery in 2006. He is working on three new collections of writing, including a book of collected poems, that will be published by the Etruscan Press next year.

As the performances take place after dark, a free minibus will take visitors from Eric Street (first left on exiting Mile End underground) on the hour and return from the gallery to the station at half past the hour.