“The organizing theme of the show, ‘The Inoperative Community’, is borrowed from Jean-Luc Nancy’s 1983 essay of the same name. All the works are said to ‘bear witness’ to what Nancy terms the ‘dissolution, the dislocation, or the conflagration of community’, which is given historical particularisation by Kidner through a focus on the period of the so-called Long 1970’s (1968-84). There are only three installation-oriented works in the show: Stuart Marshall’s 1984 Journal of the Plague Year (displayed on five wall-embedded television monitors), Ericka Beckman’s 1983 You the Better (a film which could be watched through a large door frame while on a bench outside the room featuring large lightbox/prop) and Leslie Thornton’s 1984-2015 Peggy and Fred in Hell: Folding (prjected in a space cut across by a wall featuring a circular one-way mirror, so that people viewing the film could be glimpsed from outside but not vice versa)…”
