Do Not Interrupt Your Activities, Royal College of Art Galleries, 2005 (catalogue)
A conversation with Anna Colin


In his lecture performances Christian Sievers has developed a peculiar format involving a collection of images presented as a slide show alongside a scripted text. His scripts often collage together contradictory impressions and opinions that he has gathered through questionnaires. Sievers’s presence on stage evokes a sense of vulnerability, an uncomfortable moment of mise à nu. Like a test one has to pass in front of an audience, Sievers’s difficult presentation often concludes with a personal process of understanding and resolving the issue raised in his performance. The ostensibly severe lecture performances, however, are lightened by humour and parody.

What follows are excerpts from a conversation which took place in South London in February 2005.

AC: What made you choose the particular format of your performances?

CS: I once had a strange encounter when I was still at college. I showed someone around who was interested in studying there. She appeared a bit confused, said thanks and left. A few weeks later I received a VHS tape from her. It said on it that you could play it only once and then it would self-destruct. I gathered some friends to watch it with me. It was very short and very weird. I still don’t know what it was. I’ve always found that extremely interesting: What do you see if you know you won’t get another look?

AC: By adopting the slide lecture format, you engage the viewer in an experience similar to the one you have just described, in so far as the projection of images is a consecutive act where each image is shown once in a linear progression. As a result, one is likely to concentrate harder. What matters to you in the act of showing your pictures to others and what does that process help you realise?

CS: I’ve always liked showing slides of my work. In college you have to do it all the time. Some people hate it. It always gave me the opportunity to look at the images in a fresh way, and by talking about it with others, to change their meaning. When I got my first digital camera, I took thousands and thousands of photos. All kinds, from snapshots of family and friends, to streets and landmarks. Then, as I was going through these pictures, I started to identify certain recurring themes and sculptural issues. When I started working on Tough Guys and Soft Guys, I had been thinking about hard and soft sculpture for a while. I suppose the title came from a TV review of a programme where a British man went to live with an Ethiopian family and go hungry for a month. It said he was a soft man who does a tough thing. After editing the images down from an initial trawl of several hundred, they ended up being photos of my friends. Who all turned out to be softies. The lectures are a methodical way to identify those unresolved questions, filtered down from this large archive of images. I can draw in other, disparate material, and expand my understanding of the problem. I always need material to fill some missing link so I’m constantly on the lookout. It all feeds into the next lecture. Everything is connected to everything else. I enjoy that.

AC: On what subject did you base your first performances?

CS: Originally, the lecture series were supposed to be some kind of personal news update. They were called The Christian Sievers News of the World and took place monthly. It went on for two or three months, but soon became impossible to sustain. Also, there wasn’t that much happening.

AC: To your life?

CS: To my life and also to the world. It was the beginning of 2003 and the war in Iraq was about to start. Everybody was angry, and all you could do was to watch. When I say the exercise went on for only a few months it is because I never considered the third lecture finished. It was called On Look But Don’t Touch. It was a pretty tough piece about powerlessness, even more so since the text was very personal. But at least I managed to keep my eyes open. The images were of barriers, fences and other obstructing devices in the street; reflective and fogged-up windows. When asked to propose a work for Do Not Interrupt Your Activities I thought I would come back to this lecture and finish it. I have sent out a questionnaire to friends and acquaintances and asked among other questions: ‘What do you prefer, darkness or light?’ and ‘Where would you rather be right now?’ Somebody answered: ‘I like sex in the dark’. This funny quote summed up quite well the issue of whether you prefer to see or not to see. Another person said: ‘It’s easier to orientate and tell colours apart, without light I could not work, shower, cook, drive a car, could not tell who is in front of me or which is the way home.’

AC: Are there any disciplines located outside the arts that inform your practice?

CS: The Wunderkammer approach interests me. This is the German term for cabinet of curiosity. It is a collection of everything there is in the world gathered in one room. It leads to asking questions about the world and how these objects relate to each other. My lectures work similarly. An image of the world in 30 photos is a bit like a baroque Wunderkammer. It also makes me think of German art historian Aby Warburg and Image-Atlas MNEMOSYNE, the great atlas of the visual world he developed in the 1920s.

AC: How these objects relate to each other is not only up to the person who has installed them, but also relies on the narrative or interpretation supplied by the viewer. This is also true of your performances that, at first glance, look very formal and prepared, but are at the same time cryptic and very open to various interpretations.

CS: The beauty of this is that regularly people tell me about the connections they have made, often ideas I had never thought of during the research process.

Does the Show Need to Go On? performed by Kenny McColl, Hospitalfield, Scotland, 2007