CAMH Performance: The Interview

In conjunction with the exhibition FotoFest 2016 Biennial: MPA: THE INTERVIEW: Red, Red Future, Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston presents a CAMH Performance: The Interview.

In the participatory work The Interview (2016), visitors are invited to pick up the handset of a hotline telephone, which initiates a call to the artist; during their intimate conversations, MPA and visitors will speak about life on Mars.

For the artist, this exchange functions as an analogue for both astronaut debriefings and the interviews required of civilian applicants to space exploration programs such as Mars One or SpaceX.

MPA states: “Interviews have the weight of fact, but don’t have to rely on fact. A testament has its own agency. The Interview is a testament.”

The Interview’s one-on-one exchange is an opportunity for mutual imagining that creates the possibility of a subjective counter-narrative. Who is interviewing whom? The artist? The visitor? In this open exchange, two beings come together to imagine with one another.

Pictured: MPA, “Overhead, Red Cloud,” 2014-15. Archival pigment print, 10.5 x 18 inches. Courtesy the artist. (detail above, full image below).