The latest artwork in our PAUSE series, Alone Together, by Somerset House Studios artist Seth Pimlott, was born out of group yoga practice, performance workshops, and work with memory and sensation. The film invites us to imagine the body as the dynamic centre of all change, a strange ally on our journey through life.
"Looking at it now, it seems like a nice counterpoint to instructional videos and quarantine workout plans, inviting us to have more playful relationship to embodiment, and taking us on a journey through alienation, curiosity and rapture. Turn on, tune in, drop out..."
Seth developed the film with Duchamp and Sons in 2018, a group of young people connected to Whitechapel Gallery, and the dancer Nando Messias. Over the four months, the group explored the theme of ‘transition and turnings’ with Seth developing two films that guide the viewer on a journey through the body, enacting a process of drawing mind and body into alignment and allegiance. The first features a mysterious figure that evolves into breathing, speaking portrait of the group - a body becoming aware of itself. In the second, we see the group themselves in action, taking their own bodies on a journey of self-discovery and expression, with the performance artist Nando Messias. A mumbling chorus of the sounds and rhythms of the body provides the soundtrack for the film.
Seth Pimlott makes experimental narrative films that he develops through a workshop process. The workshops themselves involve creatively engaging with the concerns of the individual or group he works with, and place faith in the power of the imagination to master one’s own narrative. Working with a mix of amateurs and professionals, this collective spirit of making results in films that are more than the sum of their parts, creating a community for which the film is meaningful, to which the film belongs, and that it represents.
After graduating from the RCA (MA Sculpture), he was the inaugural participatory artist in residence at Gasworks from 2016-2018. His recent project with Whitechapel Gallery resulted in a solo exhibition in galleries 5&6. His work has also been featured recently in exhibitions such as This is Water at MIMA, Middlesborough, and screened at festivals including Experiments in Cinema selected by Cauleen Smith in Alburquerque, and Crossroads Festival at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (all 2018). He was selected for Bloomberg New Contemporaries 2017/18, which exhibited at BALTIC, Newcastle and Block 336, London, and received the Pete Lloyd Lewis Award from Chisenhale Art Place in 2016. He is currently working on a project with the Serpentine Gallery.
