Looking Forwards
Created 1993
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The images show members of the public photographed whilst thinking of the future. The people in Looking Forwards, performing themselves for the camera, are the real-life counterparts to the fictional figures who have often haunted Forced Entertainment’s work — a small non-representative sample of the mythic urban, from Dixon’s boys and physicists to petty thieves and detectives.
Who would one ask to think about the future? What might they think? And how might they tell it in the body? The future imagined in Looking Forwards spans the utterly private and the publicly hopeful, touching on the future of a self, a country, a discipline or an idea. A multiplicity of readings are possible but none of them can have final authority. The thoughts of the people in Looking Forwards cannot be known or contained by the viewer or the photographer. They leave us, to put it bluntly, guessing.
Published in Performance Research Vol. 1. “The Temper of the Times.”
Images
credits
Hugo Glendinning / Forced Entertainment.