Gob Squad

Works for Live Art Denmark
2009 “Gob Squad’s Kitchen” at Berliner Luft 4

Gob Squad’s Kitchen
The performance takes one of Andy Warhol’s famous art films, Kitchen, as its starting point. Nothing much happens in the original film yet it somehow encapsulates the hedonistic experimental energy of the swinging sixties. Learning lines was considered ‘old fashioned’ so the actors just hang around. Sex, drugs and wild parties are referred to but nothing in particular takes place.

Gob Squad set themselves the task of reconstructing Kitchen and other Warhol films, like Eat, Sleep and Screen Test. How can they get it just right? How do they know if they’re going wrong? How did people dance in 1965? What did they talk about? Had feminism happened? Or was it yet to begin? Gob Squad’s Kitchen becomes a journey back in time and back to the future again. A quest for the original, the authentic, the here and now, the real me, the real you, the hidden depths beneath the shiny surfaces of modern life.

All photos by Malle Madsen

About the Artists
Gob Squad was founded in 1994. At the time, its members were students at Nottingham Trent University and the University of Giessen. They have made approximately 28 projects to date. They create mid-scale work that combines audience interaction with real-time video editing. The company often use popular culture to explore the complexities of everyday life. Gob Squad create and present work in urban spaces, theatres and galleries. Core members of Gob Squad are Johanna Freiburg, Sean Patten, Sharon Smith, Berit Stumpf, Sarah Thom, Bastian Trost, and Simon Will; Eva Hartmann manages the group. In Copenhagen, Erik Pold was a guest performer.

Lots of info about the group and their work can be found on gobsquad.com.