In Dreams at the COB Gallery, Camden

Hang Over

Site Specific installation

Reinforced gallery rope, Sleeping pills, Artist, Monitor and George Orwell quote. 

The Cob Gallery, Camden, UK

June - July 2013

Click here for more information

Le Prix Cube 2013

Stay Behind the Line (Example 4)

Interactive video installation

Le Prix Cube, Saint Saveur, Issy-les-Moulineaux, Paris, France

March 2013

Debt Ditch (Proposal)

Debt Ditch

Work in progress

A proposal to dig a pit into the floor of an art gallery using measurements and angles based on those of a graph that describes the growth of my student debt over the last twelve years. A sculpture is created by removing from, rather than adding to, the gallery. The piece may become a trip hazard during busy times.

Copyright 2012

SPILL National Platform 2012

Filming Critical Distance at SPILL National Platform 2012

Ipswich Art School Gallery, Ipswich, UK, November, 2012

Photograph by Sarah Kate Fowler. Copyright Sarah Kate Fowler 2012

Solo exhibition at Grand Union in partnership with Fierce international festival of live art 2012

'...Hutber’s work is a case of the unexpected – a primeval jugular shot of emotion and unease that best showcases what Fierce is all about.' Emily Gosling, Volt Cafe, April 2012

Stay Behind the Line (Example 3)

Interactive video installation, Grand Union, 2012

'Stay Behind the Line' is an installation that explores notions of ethical deferral and critical detachment and relates them to the proliferation of digitally mediated, monitored and 'manipulated' images in our day to day environments. The piece is also a self-portrait that expresses a sense of being defenseless against, and impervious to, the actions of others.

Three new pieces were also created for my exhibition at Grand Union in response to the location. They are 'painter, 'Blind Sight' and 'Reception'.


From the Fierce festival brochure...

Reynir Hutber (UK)

'Installation exploring mediated images, politics of containment, security and observation.'

'Reynir unites two aspects of live art that seemingly obsess the medium; one, the ongoing concern with the body as site, especially the politics of its vulnerability, the other, engagement with media technology as a means of altering representation and identity. Here he sets up rules that the work demands the audience break, extending his inquiry into regulation, control and self negation.'

Harun Morrison, Fierce Festival co-director

Grand Union Press release

Opening 6–9pm Friday 16 March
Exhibition continues 17 March to 22 April, open Thursday to Sunday, 12–5pm

Grand Union, in collaboration with Fierce, is proud to present work by Reynir Hutber, an emerging artist based in London, whose work explores themes of social visibility, moral relativity and the everyday imposition of authority. For this solo exhibition he will present his award winning installation, Stay Behind the Line, alongside a series of new related works.

Stay Behind the Line is an interactive installation that takes place in a specially constructed cell-like environment. When visitors enter the space through its narrow doorway, they are confronted by a wall-mounted surveillance monitor directly in front of them. They are now looking at a live video feed of the space with their feet placed in the top third of the screen. Further down in this relayed image however, there is a disturbing anomaly: a superimposed recording of the artist’s twitching, naked body that is no longer physically present in the room. What happens next is down to the visitor...

Other works in the exhibition also explore the absence of the performer. Technology is used to infuse the space with a sense of the artist’s presence and blur the division between past and present, spectator and protagonist. Through his works, Hutber addresses issues specific to the history of performance art while simultaneously exploring the anxieties and uncertainties of living in a sophisticated era of surveillance and mediation: an age in which it is becoming increasingly difficult to verify the authenticity of an image.

Fierce Festival, Birmingham’s premier live art and performance festival, runs from Thursday 29 March to Sunday 8 April 2012. Performers from around the world will converge on Birmingham to bring boundary-pushing performances and art installations to venues and unusual spaces across the city. See www.wearefierce.org for full programme listings.

Blind Sight

Interactive installation, Grand Union, 2012

Wireless night vision camera, screen on plinth, converted gallery stock room with observation window and mechanism. Mechanism fabricated by John Hutber.

'Night vision' is a technology that was developed for military use but is now installed in domestic security devices available at high street shops such as Maplins.

Painter

1/1 scale looped video projection of site specific performance, Grand Union, 2012

'Painter' is a surveillance-style recording of the artist obsessively painting/preparing the section of the wall onto which the video would later be projected at a life-size scale. The figure appears to be covering something up while simultaneously creating a space for itself to exist.

Photographs by Harminder Judge, Jaskirt Dhaliwal and Reynir Hutber 2012 for Grand Union and Fierce Festival. All images are subject to copyright. Thanks to everyone at Fierce and Grand Union.

Create an Accident

Thanks to 'Create an Accident' in Greece for featuring my work.

View Their website

'Create an Accident is an open ongoing platform about the performing and visual arts and theoretical research. Based in Athens, Greece, Create an Accident operates as a non stop lab and open field for experimental, provocative projects and non-existing landscapes.'

Glass magazine profile Oct / Nov 2011

Artist's Debt at the London School of Economics and Political Sciences

For 'Not Quite a Baker's Dozen' at the London School of Economics and Political Sciences I was invited to submit a proposal that related to the art market and notions of value. Inspired, in part, by Pierre Manzoni's seminal work, Artist's Shit (1961) I chose to exhibit the debt to the state I created while studying art as an 'immaterial' art work. Although three of my proposals were selected for the exhibition by HRL Contemporary two of the works were subsequently declined on the advice of legal experts at the LSE.

Please note that the printed statement that was hung on the gallery wall is not ‘Art’, it is just a legal document that confirms the debt’s existence, authorship and volume.

Artist's Debt

1999 - 2012, Dimensions variable

Full text about Artist's Debt

Fierce Festival start party

A chocolate cake produced by 'Quarantine Theatre' for FIERCE 2011 featuring a quote by composer John Cage.

I will be participating In Fierce Festival, Birmingham in Spring 2012

The Catlin Art Prize 2011

The Catlin Art Prize 2011

May 19th - 22nd 2011
The Tramshed, Rivington Street, Shorditch
‘The student equivalent of the Turner Prize’
The Independent online Wednesday, 12 January 2011

The Catlin Art Prize 2011

Filming Waiting to Fall at the Catlin Art Prize 2011

Photograph by Sarah Kate Fowler






Waiting to Fall

(infinite) video of site-specific performance

The Catlin Art Prize 2011, The Tramshed, Shoreditch.

'Waiting to Fall' is a site-specific video of myself hanging from one of the Tramshed's vast infra-structure of metal Ibeams. The Tramshed was dissected into a number of cubicles for the exhibition. My space was empty (apart from the screen that showed the performance).

When an audience member approached the screen they were directly beneath the space where I had been hanging. I was holding on by the tips of my fingers like Bas Jan Ader, hanging from the fragile branch of a tall tree in his seminal video 'Fall (Organic)', 1971.

Although my actions may have looked dangerous at first glance, on closer inspection the video revealed itself to be a heavily manipulated document. A short clip had been looped so as to extend the expectation of the fall forever and was framed so as to conceal all health and safety precautions. Because of the low resolution of the digital video it was hard to know if the event had actually taken place at all or if the image was a collage contrived in post production.

For Life Series (2010 - 2012)

Press Up

Looped video. filmed in Hackney, London, UK. August 2010

‘For Life’ is the generic title for a series of ‘unending’ videos in which a short performance by the artist is seamlessly looped to create ‘false’ evidence of an excruciating act of endurance or resistance. For example, in ‘Press Up’ 2010, I appear to perform the action of the title indefinitely. Although one may initially be entertained by the illusion, over time the figure comes to resemble a mechanised object, trapped in a Beckettian cycle of absurd, repetitive and pointless struggle: a subject being trained, disciplined or punished. These videos also hint at the notorious endurance based performances of artists such as Marina Abramovic and Stuart Brisley.



Stand Up Straight

Looped video. Filmed at Green Fields studio, Leipzig, Germany. February, 2012

Collaborators2, 10th September - 17th October 2010

Press Release




Stay Behind the Line 2010

Covert performance document, Framed A2 print, Edition of 5, POA, Availible through R O O M Gallery, London.

Reynir Hutber and Toby Huddlestone at R O O M Gallery, London

Stay Behind the Line (Example 2)

Video Installation, R O O M Gallery, London, June - July 2010

In this example of the work, a low resolution CCTV camera allowed visitors to view the installation space before they entered it. What the visitors on the other side of the barrier were actually seeing, and reacting to, was not revealed and from this 'outsider' perspective their behaviour may have appeared haunted and irrational. A white spotlight marked out the parameters of the space where my body was recorded and also had the effect of illuminating the visitors in a strange and spectral light as they reached towards its ‘mirage’. For more information about this project please see below…

Click for more images at R O O M, London

'Open' Magazine Interview

'Some people have chosen to cover the figure with their jackets to keep it warm or have tried to feed it. Others have reacted in a way that speaks of serious sexual abuse or gang violence.'

Click here to read an interview with Reynir in 'OPEN' magazine.

Screen captures

Guardian Online



Independent Online



Saatchi Online TV and Magazine

Reynir is awarded the Catlin Art Prize 2010

'Artist Reynir Hutber is named as Catlin Art Prize winner by eminent panel of judges as collectors flock to purchase shortlisted works.In the most exciting year yet for the Catlin Art Prize, collectors vied for the opportunity to purchase work by some of the most inspiring new names in visual art. Featuring painting, sculpture, film and performance work, the prize provides a platform for artists who have graduated the previous year.'

Judge Ben Lewis commented: ‘...Reynir’s video installation, which turned the viewer into a perpetrator with an unmistakeable reference to Iraqi and Afghani prisons, eventually won out over the rest, thanks to its combination of pressing political urgency yet modest and un-theatrical form, and the relational way it turned the position of the viewer into the real subject of the piece.’

Reynir said of his work: ‘My current art is broadly concerned with the devices through which social behaviour is coerced, monitored and evaluated. Rather than focus on the production of objects, I stage open-ended scenarios whose implications are ultimately determined by the audience’s response and interaction. I am hugely excited to have won the Catlin Art Prize, especially as the other work on show was of such a high standard.’

Quote from www.artcatlin.com








Stay Behind the Line

Interactive video installation,The Village Underground, London, May 2010

"In a small enclave to the back of Shoreditch’s Village Underground, a video screen captures artist Reynir Hutber’s naked body lying curled into a ball on the floor. A haunting evocation of surveillance culture, Hutber’s Stay Behind the Line won the Catlin Art Prize, a selection of over 500 young artists selected by curator Justin Hammond from last year’s graduate art show program."

"The screen mixes footage of Hutber twitching with a live-feed of the screen’s viewers. It’s only upon seeing one’s movements echoed behind the prone body that one realizes that the space Hutber occupies in the video is the vacant gap right besides you. It’s a subtle and clever exploration of those parts of ourselves we lose within the media watching us."

Dont Panic Magazine, Brian Welk, William Alderwick / 17 May 2010







Images by Justin Green / Art Catlin and Nathan Toper

New works in Video and Performance

The Eigenheim Gallery in Weimar, Germany

New works

Installation View, 2010

The Eigenheim Gallery, Weimar, Germany

Artist's Debt

Artist's Debt

1999 - 2012, Dimensions variable, £8026.65.

Last updated Feb 2010

In the modern global market, debts are traded and sold like assets. A debt has no physical form and yet it exists, undeniably. It is immaterial but also measurable; it has a precise dimension that grows and/or erodes over time. As a young sculptor, I created a debt to the state: a work that would prove to be the most enduring and politically relevant product of my early studies. Inspired, in part, by Pierre Manzoni's seminal work, Artist's Shit (1961), this piece comes with a framed bank statement to verify its conjoined scale and market price. Although ‘Artist’s Debt’ (1999 – 2012) has an intrinsic and increasing monitory value, transferring it to a collector represents a significant economic and artistic challenge; if it were purchased, the work would effectively cease to exist. Please note that the printed statement is not ‘Art’, it is just a legal document that confirms the debt’s existence, authorship and volume. ‘Artist’s Debt’ is a ‘worthless’ piece of conceptual art that continues a broader social interest in the notions of ‘owing’ and being ‘without value’.

Room 237

Room 237

Interactive video installation

The University Of Brighton, Brighton, UK, July 2009

The view into 'Room 237' was blocked by a false wall with a clinical soap dispenser mounted on it. Before entering the installation, visitors were encouraged to clean their hands using the antibacterial gel provided. Above the soap dispenser, an embossed plaque read: 'Strictly No Photography', a sign common to art galleries, military institutions and state detention centres.

In the next space there was a monitor mounted on the left-hand wall. When visitors looked into the monitor, they saw a live relay of themselves filmed from behind, with their turned backs framed in an open doorway. They could now also see the formerly concealed space on the opposite side of the doorway, where a naked body was crouched against the wall, twitching slightly with its face in its hands. The body was a looped and filtered recording of the artist, posed so that its age, health and gender were indeterminate. If the visitor looked for the body directly, they would not find it; it was a kind of digital mirage that could only be witnessed through mediation.

The work continued an interest in social visibility and responsibility and marked a development of the live video-compositing technique first used in 'Private View' 2008. 237 was the number of the studio in the art institution where the installation was sited: it is also the number of the hotel room in Kubrick's version of 'The Shining' where the caretaker stacked the bodies of his murdered family.

Room 237 is one outcome of an ongoing body of research. Areas have included the ethics of war photography; how human suffering is represented and the related notions of endurance, transcendence and authenticity in the work of Chris Burden and Marina Abramovic.