The Surface of Each Day is a Different Planet | 2009
Film (38 minutes)
Art Now: Lightbox | Tate Britain

Stories leak, histories collide. Bones, bodies, faces, and handwriting blur. Crowds gather and move. Open-ended and anti-documentary, The Surface of Each Day is a Different Planet builds sequential scenarios that move across time and space, while considering collectivity, anonymity and the question of identity through history, fantasy and speculation.Presented within a setting suggestive of a lecture hall, there is the anticipation of discourse: chairs and microphones are found on raised platforms yet speakers are absent. The presentation evokes the lecture- performance format commonly employed by the artists, but they, their bodies themselves, have somehow disappeared. Their voices are left behind, along with entire cabinets of curiosities.
“What happens when you layer one time on to another time? Do you get two times at once, or, do you register some other, singular temporal experience, analogous to the mysteriously singular ‘composite’ portrait of many individuals, which is neither a sum of the parts of the photographs of many faces, nor an average but a ‘new’ different face, which looks as if it belonged to a unique life. A life never lived, but made manifest as a photographic accident. Can there be a time made of juxtapositions, a time never experienced, but made serendipitously manifest by interpretative accidents? By the careful cultivation of chance encounters in scattered archives.”