CGP London: Exhibition Thumbnails - In The Wake of a Deadad

In The Wake of a Deadad

3 Oct - 11 Nov 2007

Andrew Kötting

In the Wake of a Deadad (The Installation) takes the form of 65 separate films showing the inflation of large inflatable effigies of Kötting’s Deadad and his Deadad’s Deadad (his Grandad) in various locations around the world.

Each location has a significance to his life his Deadad’s life or his Deadad’s Deadad's’ life. Together they have travelled far and wide from the French Pyrenees to the Faroe Islands and from The Valley at Charlton Athletic football club to the cemeteries of Janitzio and the Day of the Dead celebrations in Mexico. Each film represents a year of the Deadad’s life and will be running simultaneously on 65 monitors as ‘deconstructed documentary’.

Kötting’s work cuts across all disciplines but is underpinned by autobiography and personal experience. He draws upon the themes of the outsider and kinship, ‘normality’ and ‘abnormality’, the ‘abled’ and the ‘disabled’, the ‘elegiac’ and the ‘abject’, the ‘correct’ and the ‘incorrect’. To this end In the Wake of a Deadad attempts to consolidate ideas triggered by the death of his father and presents them using an assortment of media.

Kötting says of the work: ‘In the Wake of a Deadad is a metaphorical chapel to the memory of my father, an exploration of the bonds of patriarchy, and the secular exorcism of a difficult relationship. A dada documentary and right carryon’.