⁰¹ David Thorne, Katya Sander, Ashley Hunt, Sharon Hayes and Andrea Geyer, Script: Detainee: Please tell me when it’s my turn to speak because I don’t know what’s going on here., installation view, 9 Scripts from a Nation at War, Tate Modern, 13 June – 25 August 2008 
⁰² David Thorne, Katya Sander, Ashley Hunt, Sharon Hayes and Andrea Geyer, Script: Actor: And you just go on. And you just go on., installation view, 9 Scripts from a Nation at War, Tate Modern, 13 June – 25 August 2008

Amy Dickson and Rachel Taylor are Assistant Curators at Tate Modern, London and have recently curated the exhibition 9 Scripts from a Nation at War in Tate Modern’s Level 2 Gallery. The artists David Thorne, Katya Sander, Ashley Hunt, Sharon Hayes and Andrea Geyer worked collaboratively on this piece, which is constituted of 10 videos. Many of the videos present the reading of a script performed for the camera by exemplars of a specific social type, who is, directly or indirectly, related to ‘war’: The Veteran, the Lawyer, the Correspondent, the Student, the Interviewer, the Detainee, the Citizen, the Blogger, the Actor and so on. Notwithstanding the fact that the videos are in the main previously scripted, some of them show performances of people who indeed are playing ‘themselves’; some videos are performed by professional actors. The work investigates the general effects of war. It goes beyond geographical boundaries and political statements and looks at what is the content of the rhetoric of war and how language and text are instrumental in bringing across messages and information that will be interpreted as personal reactions to and experiences of war. David Thorne, Katya Sander, Ashley Hunt, Sharon Hayes and Andrea Geyer have been working together as artists, organisers, researchers and writers intermittently and in varied ways for the last seven years. They started working on this project in August 2004, the first anniversary of the US invasion of Iraq. The work was presented for the first time in Documenta 12 in Kassel, Germany in 2007. For more information visit: www.tate.org.uk/modern/exhibitions/ninescripts/default.shtm and www.9scripts.info.


Nayia Yiakoumaki: I would like to start with a question about the venue of this exhibition; can you tell me what is the function of Level 2 Gallery within Tate Modern? Does it have a different agenda from the other spaces?

Amy Dickson: The Level 2 Gallery does have a slightly different function within the institution from the other temporary exhibitions spaces or indeed the collections galleries. We do show temporary exhibitions in Level 2 but they tend to be very much focused on emerging or contemporary practice firstly, whereas Level 4 is a mixture of more established artists, or more historic artists. Also in terms of programming we have a much shorter timeframe for programming that space. Whereas for Level 4 we could be working on a show for 3 years for Level 2 we would be working for 6–8 months, the best-case scenario would be a year. So the space can react to contemporary issues in art practice but also trends and anything else happening in the art world; as with this show it reacts to political things. It is our space to respond more immediately.

NY: Who is responsible for programming the Gallery? I read that it is the only space of Tate Modern that is run by young curators, staff who work here as assistant curators. Is this the case and is it an ongoing idea?

Rachel Taylor: During the course of its history it has worked in different ways. The last year and a half it has been run by the assistant curators at Tate Modern, a group of 8–10 of us. We run it jointly, and it is overseen by one of the curators. What happens is that one or two assistant curators will work on each project.

AD: From our point of view that is such a really crucial aspect, as it is the only opportunity we get to work together with other people in the team.

RT: And be much more directly involved in programming.

NY: Do you think that its function will continue as it is?

RT: At the moment it is working really well and people are happy with it.

AD: In terms of content of the programming that it is the only space that we have to do this and it is very important that it is maintained as it is.

NY: What interested you in the work that it is being presented in Level 2 Gallery, 9 Scripts from a Nation at War?

RT: The intention for the 2007/08 programme was that Level 2 would have four shows that would speak to a general overarching theme: citizenship. Within that all the shows during the course of the year looked at a different aspect of that. The first show dealt with the Economy, the second with Belief, the third with the State and the fourth with the Individual. Those thematics were put in place before we knew which shows we were working on and who we were working with. So we came in at time when we knew we were working on the fourth show, we knew we were working together, we know that our theme was the Individual but beyond that it was really up to us to go out and decide what we wanted to do. Amy and I and another colleague were travelling to Germany last year, we went to Documenta and we saw the work; we knew immediately that this is it, this is absolutely what we have to show. It fitted so perfectly within the thematic, both Citizenship and the individual. And we were also taken by the work itself. Amy had worked with one of the artists, Sharon Hayes before, so she had some experience with working with her. And we were familiar with Andrea’s (Geyer) work. Because it was such a leap in their practice and they were working as a collaborative it was a unique piece to start with.

AD: We have both quite overlapping interests in contemporary practices that are politically engaged. Also at that time I was interested in notions of collaboration as Rachel was, so it was a very different way of working and very different way of programming this space. We’ve had monographic shows and site-specific installations, group shows, but we’ve never had one work that was multi-part; the result of five artists’ work and two curators. It was a collaborative endeavour that was interesting for us process-wise; this was the sub-text.

NY: The videos are, as most of the time-based works, presented in two main ways: projections and monitors. Considering that the work consists of nine individual parts, what were the reasons for showing some as projections and others in monitors? Is this a curatorial decision or the artists’ original set up?

AD & RT: It was a collaborative decision!

AD: I suppose that Documenta is the best place to start as it was shown there in a way which had its advantages and its disadvantages, I feel. When we saw this piece we fell completely in love with it, we thought that it was an incredible piece of work. When we came back and everyone was commenting on Documenta 12, we were saying that we saw this amazing work and people were saying ‘oh where was that?’, ‘we missed that’, and we realised that almost everyone we know had walked straight passed it because of the way it was shown. It was shown on these small tables with little screens. The flip side of it was that it was incredibly intimate; it really sucked you in. It held your attention, you felt a complete engagement with the work and it was partly to do with the way that it was staged and you were watching it. So we wanted to retain that, that intimacy. We wanted to find a way of pacing it to help people cope with the fact that it’s ten individual films, a lot of visitors find engaging with film in a gallery situation daunting. We wanted to give people a chance to at least be able to engage meaningfully with a very difficult subject matter and to make it as accessible as possible …

RT: … and more visually intriguing. I think the other thing to say is that it is so apparent, when you spend some time with the work, how much each of the different parts interrelates. We wanted to open up this a little bit and to make these connections much more visible. It is what we were saying before that it was very much a collaborative exercise. Amy and I had been talking before about what we wanted to do in terms of presentation and when we started having in-depth discussions with the artists we found that we were very much on the same page. Because they had found that the presentation at Documenta 12 had its strengths but also its weaknesses and they were very keen to display it in a different way, to open it up and to find other ways of working with projections as well as monitor pieces and so on. The precise placement of each of the works and the way which they inter-relate was very much something that we came to only during the installation period.

AD: It was quite a protracted and intense process.

NY: We are witnessing very different levels of experience of war and very different reactions to it but the characters speak as if they were describing any event. Do you think that the work normalises war, by presenting it as another social reality that affects human experience? Where I want to come to is, if the work presents war as one thing among lots of other things which are happening around us it does not necessarily conceive it as something devastating.

AD: I think that sometimes yes and sometimes no. It is this sense of dislocation, particularly of being a veteran for example, these people, who appear so young and then are talking about these extreme experiences in Iraq so I think it is looking at how we normalise war and is picking up on that process of how the media does that, how digital experience does that and how the information we receive about the war is presented to us and therefore normalises it but I think it is this profound sense of dislocation that comes out strongly.

RT: Obviously we spend a lot of time with the artists talking with them about the work and one thing which Ashley (Hunt) said, which I thought was very useful: they wanted to make a work that was about being at war but not being in the theatre of war. This idea that the war affects us all even as we continue with our day-to-day life and not switch the TV on, yet in some ways it is an implicit part of who we are at this moment in time. I think in Actor there is one moment where one of the actors reads a transcript of an interview where somebody is describing how war gets into your psyche in a very basic level and this is true with people who are directly involved in the war like the Detainee or the Veteran, the Blogger, the Journalist but also people at home. The Anthropology students who are trying to come to terms with their own feelings of what it is like to be alive during the time of war and how this affects their experience. So I think all of that is a really important part of what the work is about.

AD: I suppose from picking what Rachel said, I know I am jumping ahead to your other question, is the absence of the documentary. Initially when the artists started they wanted to make some kind of documentary film and all of their previous practice as individual artists has engaged with documentary forms. Then they felt that that wasn’t adequate in order to describe these experiences related to this conflict.

NY: There is a theatrical element which is at the core of the piece; the ‘real’ statements are presented through mediation. How does that relate to making the work more immediate for the viewer? Although it sounds odd I personally felt that, precisely because of our disbelief in the Media nowadays, the performative element adds here a further integrity to the statements. The fact that I witness actors reading scripts found from ‘sources’ seems more truthful than the directed and biased announcements from the media. It is similar to how oral history works; when somebody encounters a testimony or event this is simultaneously the guarantee that this testimony or event has taken place.

AD: I think the first response is that each of the different films contains different elements that are performative or not, edited or not or found scripts or not. The Veterans are actual veterans that you see them editing their own words that are a result of the interview with the artists; it is their words that are presented to them edited into the statement by the artists which they are soon, sub editing and adding to. So it is constantly this tension between the performative and the real if you like.

RT: It is worth pointing out because the strategies are so different in each video; in fact the interview with the Correspondent is a straight interview. In that instance, although you are not hearing the questions that have been asked, all of the responses are actually straight responses by people who are quite used to performing the role of mediators just as actors are in a different way. You see people reading their own words, people reading other people’s words …

AD: As in the Lawyer where it was a straight interview but you are hearing it as told by an actress, with an enacted audience questioning her.

RT: And I believe that one of the things that was crucial to the artists was to play with all of these levels, what’s real and what is fictionalised through mediation I suppose. There is nothing there that is fictionalised, a constructed story, unless you take Citizen, which is the chalkboard piece, this is gleaned from different sources some of which are from interviews some of which are from things that the artists came across in other contexts.

NY: To what extend are the films ‘documents’ and to what extend are they ‘fiction’? Conceptually of course they jump from one to the other and that is fascinating. But are there actual parts within the same video that are clearly fictional for instance?

AD: The artists are problematising this very thing and this is at the heart of their endeavours. I think a good piece to talk about in relation to this question is Detainee, where the situation is that the words in Detainee are from 18 combatant status review tribunals from Guantanamo. Therefore they are actual ‘documents’ but it hit me like a truck the first time I saw the video how much these words from these tribunals have actually been edited by whomever has recorded them, so again although it is a historical document it is subject to somebody’s editorial.

RT: And furthermore, the use of translation and transcription and editorialising afterwards. In some cases entire passages have being removed. There is a degree of censorship in terms of the information that is presented at these supposed trials that of course are not trials at all. In a sense they are a mockery of what a trial should be and then subsequently there is a degree of censorship of what later becomes accessible to the public.

AD: As well as the fact that these documents were essentially buried on the Internet. A Freedom of Information request meant that the American Government had to release them but they did it in such a way that it was impossible to run a text search on them — because they were PDF files you could not search for a name or place. Also they were in a very obscure part of the Government’s website …

NY: This work has so many layers in terms of information: how it is constructed and subsequently how it is communicated. Surely, when viewing the works, during the time one is able to spend inside a gallery, one receives a very small portion of what has been ‘deposited’ in the videos but it is clear that the work is very complex in terms of reading, a kind of a simulacrum of a simulacrum!

AD: We organised a live performance reading in the Starr Auditorium of the transcripts (of the CSRTs) and, to see them as a mass in that way that, you do start to perceive differences in the way that they were recorded. Also it was very interesting to see the kind of conventions, in the way that their conducting had developed. To go back to your question, I guess it is problematising that relationship very much.

NY: Going back to the question about what the work has to say in relation to the war. In the videos we observe people and listen to their experiences. They are all different characters that gravitate around the war. Directly or indirectly, we are all affected by the war and this is what the work takes for granted. But it also becomes a reflection of the administrative aspect, the organogram, of the war: the structure of a hypothetical ‘personnel’, the detainee, the veteran, the journalist, etc.

RT: Although it is about scripting, it is in the title implicitly and there is a level of theatricality…

NY: … and role playing …

AD: Exactly, and what the roles are, and I think that comes through so much through the work, is actually how arbitrary those roles are. And in a way how you can be the Citizen but you could equally be the Detainee. In a way these are very prescribed roles but very fluid and arbitrary in some cases.

NY: Is the work concerned with the fact that a particular nation is at war rather than the political implication of the war itself? Is it asking what happens to the people? It is very clear that it does not investigate what happens to the invaded area and to the ones who have received the war as a devastating condition which is affecting their everyday life …

AD: This is exactly at the heart of what they were interested in.

NY: The spaces where the videos have been shot are very recognisable institutional spaces such as auditoriums and classrooms with distinctive furniture and fittings. How do you think that these prosaic spaces relate to the construction of the characters who are reading? Was the artists’ intention to neutralise the environment and to what degree it is deliberate?

RT: It is incredibly deliberate, all the artists are very precise in terms of how they construct and stage their work.

AD: In the presentation of the work here, nothing is by accident. From the angle of the tables down to the fact that there are these screens on the side so that you can concentrate and focus. Now, back to the institutional visual language around the work, this is something that you can see in the way that we have installed the work with the pull down screens, etc. I think it is all about this sense of ‘staging’ and the visual language; about information and the way we receive information.

RT: This is key to the work. Historically, the work came about because the artists were all present at the New School in New York doing fellowships at the same time. I think that somehow being in that space probably had a lot to do with the way they conceived the work originally. The video with the anthropology students is directly about being in such a space, in an educational institutional space. One of the things it encourages you to do is to think what an institution is. An institution of education, but also the Media as an institution, the Military Industrial Complex as an institution and so on. As well of course as making us aware that things we take for granted are not necessarily natural.

NY: Actually looking at the topos that generates and sustains particular strands of thinking.

AD: The theatricality of furniture and how this affects the way we feel, the way we behave. Detainee is a really good example. The actual images that you can find on the Internet of the spaces where these tribunals take place are these makeshift port-a-cabins where they have gathered a few plastic chairs and other basic furniture. The one thing that they make sure they have got in the space where the tribunal takes place is a table that is covered so you cannot see their legs; according to psychology you are much more secure if your legs are covered. So there is a kind of hierarchy in the way that this very makeshift space in Guantanamo has actually been furnished very precisely. It looks as if it is makeshift and that they made it up with what they’ve had available but regarding its function on a psychological level, it has been very carefully designed. Again, I think that this was something that early on interested the artists. This relates to both the ways that they made the works and to the way they are presenting it.

NY: I was wondering how you would compare the two readings of the works: the one in Documenta 12 and the one now, at Tate, after all the conversations you had with the artists which, I assume, were many. Does the political significance of the work need all the background information we have been discussing in order to take its effect?

RT: As we have already talked about it is an incredibly complex, dense and vast work, there are hours and hours of material there. By virtue of the fact that we did not have a huge amount of time to spend with it at Documenta, we obviously did not see the whole thing.

AD: We spend about an hour … but the Detainee is five hours on its own!

RT: As with many things and not just time-based works, the more time you spend on them the richer they become; but you can spend an hour and still come away having a really extraordinary experience, as we did. Having said that I think, because these were issues that we were really interested in anyway, and because we had the great privilege of being able to speak to the artists about the work, their intentions and how they conceived the work, obviously that brought much more immediate connections. What we haven’t touched on and I think it is quite crucial to the work and the question about institutions, is that one other institution that comes up again and again throughout the piece is the institution of language. If we talk about the arbitrariness of people’s roles within a theatre of war (or within a war outside the theatre of war) language helps to define these roles. The types of language that one uses and is actually allowed to use, really restrict the way that you can be conceived within that context.

AD: I suppose Actor is the piece that really pulls that up very strongly. You see such a vast range of language within that one piece that is used around the war: from the personal experience, the letter about the brother, through to the act of learning, the legal terms that have been developed around the conflict. The other thing I wanted to say which goes back to the institution of Tate and the issue that this is such a vast and complex piece, is that one of the things that I love about having this piece in Level 2 Gallery is the fact that it is a free space, people can walk into it any time, so that people can come back and see it and spend more time with it. The fact that it is inside the institution but it is physically at the edge of the institution.

NY: This is true and it is perhaps why people who were not necessarily intending to visit 9 Scripts from a Nation at War become aware of it anyway. People come to this area of the Thames bank to stroll. What I found quite intriguing is that when you are viewing all these videos, on the one hand you are emerged in the world of statements that they posit and, on the other, the work has been installed in such a way that makes viewers very self-conscious of where they are: inside Tate Modern, a large institution with thousands of visitors, tourists and art goers alike. While watching Lawyer for example you can also see the crowd moving towards the Tate, the people photographing the building or stopping on the Millennium Bridge to look at the view — they cannot see us, of course, because of the dark glazing. How is this condition cooperative to the work?

AD: Oh yes and you see people taking pictures of themselves in front of the building …

NY: Precisely! I found that it did intervene in the viewing in an interesting way.

RT: That makes us very happy …

AR: … it was a conscious intention.

NY: Well, it certainly polarises the experience, as you are inside the room behind the large glazed window viewing something so extraordinary different from the morning recreational walk along the river. As curators of this show is this at all helpful for you? The fact that in the reading of the work this condition kicks in?

RT: Very much so, this whole idea of opening up the work isn’t about just opening it up within the gallery space, it is about opening it up externally and trying to acknowledge the inside and the outside institutionally but also physically in the embodiment of the space. I think that one of the things that is actually quite interesting is that you talked about the Lawyer being in the window space but there is another work that is in the window space, the Interviewer.

NY: Yes, that is true.

RT: If you are sitting in front of that work you see the people outside and you hear these questions from the Interviewer. There is this great correspondence between what is going on, the idea that these questions have been answered around you but they could also be put to any of the people passing by — I think this is really crucial.

AD: On a practical level this is why we chose that film to be by the window, because we wanted the ambient light, we did not want it to be a dramatically lit space. We felt that people are going to spend some time in there, it is summer, and they may not want to sit in a really dingy dark space. At the same time we wanted to emphasise this relation between the inside of the institution and the space on the outside. I felt really proud that we could put that work in that space in terms of showing it in a free space. For the artists it was important as well, but for us it was extremely important. The fact that there is a chance of visitors returning is very much at the heart of the work.

RT: It is very important to this kind of thinking; the philosophy of the work is that it is very accessible …

AD: …

and also very visible within the institution.

RT: Thinking about other spaces I do not believe that there is another space where that work would have functioned in the same way within Tate Modern. In a sense Level 2 Gallery was the ideal space for it.

NY: OK, a last question which, I think, may wrap the whole conversation up. The UK was involved heavily in the invasion of Iraq. In that sense, they were the ‘bad guys’. There has been a kind of guilt-complex building up because of the involvement in the war, from politicians to citizens. Do you think that it is important to show the work in the UK and did you have any specific reactions to it?

AD: I think that institutionally it raises interesting issues to show work like that for the reasons you just described. Although the artists are coming from quite liberal, very politically engaged practices, one of the things that the work does very well is to avoid a polemic ‘good versus evil’ in a way that a Hollywood film might be discussing the war. I think that it very cleverly picks on the issues at the heart of it without making any really didactic judgements. And yes it was incredibly important to show it here within the UK context. Also the artists were interested to see how …

RT: … how people would react and if it was received in a different way than it was for instance in the States or Germany. It was shown in Boston in a configuration very similar to Documenta 12 in a group show earlier this year and it will be shown in Los Angeles at REDCAT in November 2008 so in a sense they’ve been conscious of where they want the work to be seen. It is interesting to see this trajectory about where it has been shown and how it has been presented.

NY: Interesting to see which venues request the work for loan.

RT: Precisely. It was interesting for us to see the UK’s position whether it is similar or different to the US or Germany or anywhere else.

AD: Particularly the timing of the show has been important to us. We are in the run up to the American elections but also looking at the political situation in the UK at present, as well as the reinstating of habeas corpus for detainees in Guantanamo. Time as much as geography have been important.

RT: Some of that was serendipitous but we were aware of the fifth anniversary of the invasion in Iraq which was earlier this year so there were other things at play when we were scheduling the show — and other things which have come up subsequently which really made it much more resonant than we expect it.

AD: The response we’ve had from people in terms of the role of a cultural institution in the face of these political events has been really interesting. Shami Chakrabarti from Liberty (The National Council for Civil Liberties) who came and gave a gallery talk was raising the issue that perhaps people feel it is easier to come and ask those difficult questions within a cultural institutional space — what is the political space for people to do those things nowadays and in what way has the cultural institution moved into that role? How does this connect to the Internet and forums and all the different ways that people have to communicate and express themselves? It all links back to what the artists are trying to do with the work. Back to the critique of the institutions, it has been much more profound than I anticipated.

NY: What were the reactions from within the Institution? Your colleagues, for example.

RT: We have had such an overwhelming response, really encouraging and supportive. Across the board everyone has been very excited. Having the opportunity to touch on more political issues within the programme is very important. This work, even if you divest it from its political ramifications, it is still a very interesting piece about the deconstruction of the way that written and spoken language work, and as we have already talked about, and the notion of role-playing and the performative.

NY: The first time I watched the videos I stayed for about one hour. In the first two minutes I knew I was being seduced by the work. It was definitely a very absorbing encounter.

AD: There is immediacy to it. It is time-based and it needs its time but it is so complex and immediate.

NY: It is also very precisely edited. The scripts are very well worked through, nothing seems unnecessary.

RT: You can come in at any point and receive the same intensity of information.

NY: I wanted to thank you very much; I do not want to keep you more. It has been a very pleasant conversation.

RT: Thank you for your interest, it has been great to think about those issues again.

AD: It has been a real pleasure to talk about it with you, thank you for giving us the opportunity.


9 Scripts from a Nation at War took place at Tate Modern, London, from 15 June to 25 August, 2008.

Nayia Yiakoumaki is an artist and curator who lives and works in London and Athens. She is currently Archive Curator at the Whitechapel Gallery, London.