The Daily Mirror

In French, “fait divers,” which can literally be translated as “diverse things,” refers to a special section in daily newspapers featuring local news and peculiar curiosities. The Daily Mirror, both the name of a British tabloid and the title of Richard Sides’s new work, not only connects to our everyday media environment but also combines the documentation of our existence with personal narratives of fates, passions, and desires.

Both a work and a stage, The Daily Mirror consists of a construction of leftovers from past exhibitions, chipboard and other wood, and banal covering materials such as carpet and click laminate flooring, created in an improvised dialog with Fluentum’s structured architecture. Via the everyday aesthetics of hardware store products and cheaply produced decorative elements, the gesture of artistic intervention—in this case the sculptural appropriation of space—shifts to a homely occupation with a cosily inviting interior. The autonomy of an artistic work, generally striving to establish a symbolic context of its own, overlaps here a form of private seclusion. The solitary wooden shack is inhabited by a two-channel video work, translating its own frame of meaning into an architectural encapsulation: by interlacing spaces, a setting—Sides’s installation—within a setting—Fluentum as an institution—within a setting—the historical architecture of the space—, The Daily Mirror exemplifies how staging and meaning can give rise to spaces, in content as well as in form.

The basic structure of the video work, placed within the architectural shell, is a seemingly never-ending sequence of street views drifting by like the view from an imaginary window, interlinking various scenes such as languorous landscape shots and seemingly aimless table conversations. Richard Sides collages these often loosely staged shots in such a way that their musically improvised rhythm paints the picture of an unsettled present. In the at times confrontational and at times conciliatory negotiation between an inside and an outside, a private state of being and public participation, The Daily Mirror thus questions the boundary between the I that interprets and the Other that communicates.