A Class(y) Lecture by Elly Clarke, Galerie Wedding, Berlin, November 2018

A Class(y) Lecture by Elly Clarke was a solo lecture-performance turned installation that took place in November 2018 at Galerie Wedding in Berlin. The opening performance activated the installation, which was then open as an exhibition for a week until the closing performance. A Class(y) Conversation was an artist talk with curator Jan Tappe about the show and its context, during which the exhibition was slowly taken down as elements of the performance were reenacted and discussed. As an activated installation, the exhibition consisted of my own framed photographs from The George Richmond Portrait Project (2008-14), projections of photographs of exteriors & interiors of houses I visited and of the George Richmond portraits I encountered; objects that relate to different stories; script extracts and the Keynote lecture as QuickTime movie with the embedded audio and images. In the back room was a double slide show projection of the interiors and approaches to the houses I visited. This exhibition was the final instalment of a two-year curatorial series at Galerie Wedding entitled Unsustainable Privilege. Possibly the most personal work I have ever made, it looked at the British class system and the drag as well as the privilege of inheritance and the objects and mindsets that often accompany it, and the affect this has upon contemporary British politics and society. Through this performance, I developed the concept of ‘ancestral drag’. Please contact me for a private link to documentation of the performance.