Flagrant

Flagrant Peter Grego 2003: DVD (10 mins looped) The world between childhood and adolescence is a place of creative imagining. It is a time for exploring possibilities. Style indicators such as hair, clothes and music become serious concerns – the public face of a developing identity. Underpinning everything is the growing awareness of a cultural heritage. Flagrant is about how we begin to negotiate these ideas of who we are. The video work presents a single image on screen; the face of an adolescent of mixed heritage. The face, made up to visualise a number of national flags, is divided vertically through the centre ‘… a doubling, dissembling image’ (Bhabha: 1994). The piece, alluding to the work of Fanon (1967) and Lacan (1977) as well as Bhabha, presents mask-like split images cycling through, what could be described as, a series of identity-negotiations. The work was recently purchased by Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery and is currently being shown as part of the museum’s permanent collection. The work was produced for the exhibition, True Stories, which opened at Wolverhampton Art Gallery in 2003/04. An exhibition catalogue with an essay by Wanjiku Nyachae was published by Wolverhampton Art Gallery. The exhibition was funded by: Arts Council England, Wolverhampton City Council, Birmingham Libraries, Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, Museu de Arte Contemporanea, Sao Paulo, Black Country Touring, Wolverhampton University, University of Central England.