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Awkward, a video/performance work that presents the attempted negotiation of one person past another in a narrow and cluttered passageway.

HD video/performance work (05m 43s) in black/white devised and created by Ian Wieczorek and Alan Rutherford.

The process is captured from above. The two participants, the ‘dynamic’ instigator (in black) and the reactive ‘obstacle’ (in white), negotiate the act of passage in an awkward and clumsy but ultimately successful transaction.

The black/white juxtaposition recalls the oppositional energies of the Yin-Yang duality of Daoist philosophy. The use of slow motion magnifies a small and insignificant act into a more universal reflection on the experience of obstacles and how we deal with and negotiate them, the slowed-down audio dialogue adding a sense of monumentalist absurdity to the inherent humour of this awkward encounter.