SARAH DUFFY

Photos by Chris Lee

Five Day, site-specific participatory performance at 'No Passive Mingling', commissioned for The Royal College Of Art's Curating Contemporary Art Degree show, 2024

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​An intervention inspired by the clubs and cabaret bars of The Weimar Republic, which often featured table telephones that allowed customers to call other tables to flirt and make new connections. With this context in mind, I created a small telephone network that allowed exhibition visitors to to call other telephones in the space, opening up the potential for all sorts of interactions to occur, from the flirtatious to the absurd. This piece explored the dynamics of the social spaces we inhabit and our ambivalent relationship to phones, in an era when an increasing amount of communication takes place in the virtual world - often at the expense of real world interactions.