26 June 2015
7 – 9pm
Free
The Royal Standard presents a series of three live events taking place during the summer. Each event invites an artist to showcase new performance work, all of which are vastly different and entirely experimental.
To continue The Royal Standard: LIVE!, Jake Laffoley will present a new live event.
Toilet time-compression. A service to be activated (duration variable).
At any given museum, foundation or enterprise there will be a maximum time limit for toilet breaks: 2 minutes to be precise. If one breaches this rule a member of staff will abruptly invite the guest to move on – “times up!”
Laffoley’s practice often concerns research into labour. How do we define it? What are its conditions? Who is performing labour, and on whose terms? Querying new and increasingly bizarre methods to measure workplace productivity, Toilet time-compression explores the traditional regulation of time, and asks whether the dynamics of our life, social space, and possibility for political action would be diminished if timed so precisely. It examines the idea that the one place in which you can feel like you can escape, to not be surveyed, has all of a sudden become governed by an algorithmic ideology.
Laffoley is from Birmingham, and lives and works in Paris, where he is currently studying at the Institut des hautes études en arts plastiques. Recent exhibitions include Images Float like Marshmallows – activation n°2 (The Williamsburgh Savings Bank Tower, New York) and Crabs in Class Division at Reality Part One (The Blade Factory, Liverpool).
The Royal Standard: LIVE! Will continue with a performance by Louisa Martin on 10/07/15.