Mathieu Briand: I will do a new piece commissioned by the Tate Modern. It’s a collaboration with a choreographer Prue Land and we will do a performance inside the Turbine Hall. Prue Lang: The basis of this performance is we invite one hundred members of the public that have responded to newspaper articles and do they want to switch their identity for one hour and be part of a real time performance. These one hundred participants will actually wear a mask so their face or identity will change but their clothes will stay the same and during the period of one hour they are going to respond to instructions I will send them by SMS. So the masks are the face of the artist but then they are fitted to each individual person so they will look different on the person and then according to if you have glasses or what kind of hair or what kind of clothes you know there is going to be some individual presence as well. Mathieu Briand: We hope that this will help people to go out of their body too you know, so it’s for that we put the identity from someone else to be someone else. The physical is not really important. It’s just to help them to put their mind outside themselves. Prue Lang: I think the exciting part about this performance is that it is actually performed by the public. It’s instantaneous so I think this tension itself is quite exciting and especially in a big space with other things going on I think it could be quite disorientating for the public who are watching and also for the public participating. The idea is to put yourself into the system, change your identity and therefore your social behaviour and your social interaction and your physical presence in this space will be different to what you normally do.
