The Separation Line

Director: Katie Davies

Year: 2018

THE SEPARATION SYSTEM (2017/18) is a collaborative commission facilitated by FACT’s Veterans in Practice programme, produced by veterans through workshops at HMP Liverpool and HMP Altcourse with artist Katie Davies. Taking the form of both a single channel cinematic film and a two-screen immersive installation, the piece explores the distinct, yet interconnected, spaces of the military, custody and ‘civilian’ life. Exploring these spaces and the experiences within them through the notion of work, an everyday activity that unites these worlds and is familiar to us all, the film communicates what we, as a civilian audience, do not understand about the unique set of relations, actions and responsibilities held by the individuals within these spaces.

Director: Katie Davies

Year: 2008

Filmed at the Demilitarized Zone on the border between North and South Korea, the work 38TH PARALLEL seeks to portray the particular reality of this contested site. It is a reality marked by an eerie sense of latency. Constantly alert, constantly inert, North and South face each other in a stalemate situation sealed by a cease-fire agreement 55 years ago. In her video, Davies operates in this void. <br /> <br /> Working with the United Nations Armistice Commission and the United States Armed Forces in Korea, she shows how political reality manifests itself here, beyond representation, in the ways how space is structured and time is regimented in this militarized environment. Facing each other across the turnpike, for instance, border guards of both sides execute the silent ceremonies of authority proscribed by their military protocol. It’s choreography of empty gestures enacted on the stage of a deserted strip of land and bleak interrogation rooms. <br /> <br /> Davies then shows the local epicentre of conflict of global proportions to be a non-place where power manifests itself in ghostly acts of decorum performed in suspended time.

Director: Katie Davies

Year: 2005

Filmed in Santa Monica, Los Angeles, LOOKING FOR ABRAHAM is a four-minute excerpt from a stand up routine captured during happy hour in a European hostel. The comic cultivates a relationship between the audience and himself that unnervingly veers between public performance and private confession. In an environment where this self-effacing routine could be his genuine act, the audience sits uncomfortably as they try to draw the line between fiction and reality.<br /> <br /> LOOKING FOR ABRAHAM was selected for New Contemporaries 2005