HD video projection, stereo sound, dur: 00:12:42

Performers:
Bishop May Down and Craig Manson
Production Assistant: Matthew Cosslett

Production funded by Glasgow Life and Creative Scotland (VACMA)

WATCH

Part of “LOVE STORIES”

TWISTED PAIR (2023), is orientated around two erotic and parodic phone calls between two characters, Receiver and Caller. The characters invert and confuse the binary subject positions imposed on them by the medium of the telephone: Receiver plays active and Caller passive. The technology of the telephone is embraced as a blindfold, causing a disconnect between action and result, imitating a typical sadomasochistic scenario. Receiver and Caller vie for erotic control, experience existential breakdowns, climax and beg for more in an absurdist script that ventriloquises dialogue from queer cinema and lyrics from popular music released between 1975 and 1985. The film embraces an alternative periodisation that marks significant socio-political changes with parallel and consequential impacts on gay culture, aesthetics and telecommunications.

TWISTED PAIR’s soundtrack and background, appropriated from pop music and cult cinema, stage an unstable but ultimately seductive aesthetic idea of the period. Reimagined between piss and a rose-tinted contemporary perspective, this bulk of material forms a counter-archive, used at will by an unseen and barely heard narrator. It remains unclear whether they are yearning for, lamenting or dismissing these histories.