How Can You Love Me Knowing That I Could Never Love You? is the first installment of a three part project by Johnston Sheard.
The first act by Johnston Sheard, is a seance of humming tongues serenading to a piano piece composed by the artist, with pedal steel guitar accompaniment. The gallery, returning to its previous guise as a place of worship, is divided into a known and an unknown realm by a tabernacle of dead flowers. A choir of singers attempt to defy the impending ephemerality of mortal love by disseminating their emotions across the divide into the unknown eternal. Making indelible transmissions to their eternal paramours like the entangled supernatural photons of quantum physics.
In the second act by Nils Alix-Tabeling, the unknown realm responds in the form of a film depicting a hypothetical sphere of fairytale archetypes hidden within the quantum. Protagonists struggle to become human through a surrealist narrative of disappearances and teleportations. Schizophrenia is questioned as a supernatural power that can penetrate the layers within polysemic objects, enabling protagonists to transition between the visible and invisible, and communicate with the unknown.
Featuring:
Piano – Eeva Reetta Laiho
Pedal Steel Guitar- Jez leather
Saxophone – Jeff Bennett
Drums And Percussion – Keef Winter
Choir Conductor – Eleanor Westbrook
Vocal Workshop facilitator – Elena Dana
Cinematographer : Thomas Depas
Actors : Anastasia Bay, Arthur Egloff
Sound : Johnston Sheard
Special thanks to Whitecross Community Centre, Peabody Estates Gardening Club, Zoé Denys and Dominik Krauss.
Supported by Fluxus Art Projects and using public funding by Arts Council England