Serpentine Cinema and Sheffield Doc/Fest collaborated for a second year with Heather Phillipson’s exhibition FINAL DAYS following the artist’s 2014 Park Nights performance, ‘the flavour of cooling enormities’.
FINAL DAYS is Phillipson’s commissioned video and sculptural installation for Castle House, a defunct department store in Sheffield city centre. FINAL DAYS posits real-life shopping as a now inoperative, disembodied landscape. Structured episodically, FINAL DAYS’ suite of six videos, shown on clustered monitors, functions as sequential ‘departments’ (bedroom, underwear, towels and textiles, hosiery, office and special offers) – each one a means to conjure – or depart from – social, personal and intimate scenarios, now physically absent.
Bringing together screens, audio bleeds and material conglomerations that resemble packaging, stacking and merchandise, FINAL DAYS combines the technological bombardment of a televisual retail arena with the unboxed promise of an online warehouse.
On view throughout the duration of the festival, FINAL DAYS was commissioned by Sheffield Doc/Fest, with support from Arts Council England. Presented in partnership with University of Sheffield, Serpentine Galleries and Forma Arts.
Heather Phillipson’s recent solo exhibitions and events have taken place at Tate Britain, Bunker259 (New York), BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Whitechapel Gallery, the ICA and include a video commission for Channel 4 television. Phillipson is also an award-winning poet. In September 2014, Phillipson presented the flavour of cooling enormities as part of the Park Nights series in the Pavilion 2014 by Smiljan Radic. In October 2014, she designed the stage of the Extinction Marathon at the Serpentine North Gallery.
