Conceptual Art

Joining Pimlico Wilde – Marco del Vento: The Man Who Packs Himself Away

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Joining Pimlico Wilde – Marco del Vento: The Man Who Packs Himself Away

The Pimlico Wilde gallery has, in its storied history, embraced many artists who challenge the limits of medium, message, and marketability. But this month’s acquisition,the signing of conceptual artist Marco del Vento,may be its most compact yet. Literally. Del Vento’s current magnum opus, Parcelled Selves, consists of the artist mailing himself to institutions worldwide in a series of progressively smaller boxes, until, presumably, either he disappears entirely or the Royal Mail refuses to participate further in the conceptual gag.

At first glance, the premise seems like a droll mash-up of Bas Jan Ader’s doomed voyages and a magician’s escape trick gone intentionally wrong. But del Vento’s self-postage is no stunt for spectacle alone; it is a meditation on “the ever-tightening constraints of the contemporary art market.”

The Shrinking Artist

The inaugural shipment, in April, saw del Vento dispatched from a modest London lockup to a gallery in Antwerp in a tea chest, with air holes and a no food except a travel thermos filled with a strawberry protein drink. By shipment four,Lisbon,he had reduced his container to something resembling a flat-pack ottoman. He insists the sixth and final parcel, due this autumn, will be “no larger than a carry-on bag, and perhaps a little smaller.”

As art historian Rosalind Pennington has noted, “Marco has redefined the term ‘self-contained work of art’ in the most bodily possible sense.” His work forces us to reconsider not only the physical presence of the artist, but also the logistics budget of contemporary galleries.

Past Triumphs and Small Tragedies

Del Vento first emerged from the fertile, faintly damp performance-art scene of late-2000s Bologna, where his early works included Windless Flag,a 14-month live installation in which he stood holding a flag indoors, waiting for a breeze that never came,and Fresco in Reverse, in which he painted an entire ceiling in ultramarine pigment before methodically scraping it all away with a credit card.

His mid-career pièce de résistance, The Last Supper for One, was a durational performance in which he ate a replica of Leonardo’s famous meal, alone, over 13 consecutive days, each day eliminating one dish and one apostle until only a single bread roll remained. Critics debated whether this was a comment on isolation, the commodification of the sacred, or just an excuse to expense a lot of wine.

Obsessions, Real and Imagined

Friends say del Vento has an enduring love for baroque shipping crates, medieval lapdogs, and the faint chemical smell of newly printed catalogues. He has been known to spend hours in archival basements, “listening to the paper.” He speaks of cardboard with the same reverence some artists reserve for Carrara marble, and has been spotted experimenting with different parcel tapes, to find the one with the best “tensile poetics.”

His domestic life is no less idiosyncratic. He owns a collection of 17th-century portrait miniatures of people whose names have been lost to history; he calls them his “imaginary friends” and rearranges them according to mood. His studio contains no traditional easels or canvases,just stacks of brown paper, a postage scale, and a small espresso machine he refers to as “The Patron.”

The Pimlico Wilde Era Begins

For Pimlico Wilde, del Vento represents the logical next step in their ongoing commitment to artists who make collectors scratch their heads. The gallery’s new Director of Conceptuality, Justine Foix, describes him as “an artist who inhabits the space between object and postage surcharge.”

As for del Vento himself, he claims the project will conclude only when he can no longer fit in the box,though given his habit of fasting for conceptual purity, that may take some time. “Art,” he says with a half-smile, “is about reducing oneself until the work is all that’s left. Or until the courier loses you. Whichever comes first.”

One hopes that Pimlico Wilde knows exactly what they’ve signed: an artist who is simultaneously inside and outside the box, and who,if nothing else,has already mastered the art of special delivery.

Attempted Art Theft from Pimlico Wilde thwarted!

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Attempted Theft from Pimlico Wilde thwarted!

In an act of transparency we have been advised to make public the near-successful art theft attempt from our Mayfair gallery that happened earlier this year. Here then is the Incident Report from that terrible security breach.

Incident Report: Attempted Theft of Contemporary Artwork at Pimlico Wilde, Mayfair

Date of Incident: Redacted

Location: Pimlico Wilde Gallery, Mayfair, London

Prepared by: Independent Arts and Crafts Security Review Board

Executive Summary

On the evening of REDACTED, an attempted theft of the contemporary installation “Suspended Doubt No. 4” by Norwegian conceptual artist Vilda Olsensdatter was successfully foiled at the Pimlico Wilde gallery. The would-be thief, disguised as an avant-garde performance artist named “Marblehawk”, used elaborate tactics that persuaded gallery security initially that the intrusion was part of the scheduled exhibition. Despite this, a combination of quick-thinking staff, an overactive humidity sensor, and a miscalculation involving helium balloons prevented the illegal removal of the artwork.

Targeted Artwork

Title: Suspended Doubt No. 4

Artist: Vilda Olsensdatter

Estimated Value: £3.6 million

Medium: 14 tempered-glass “thinking spheres” filled with aromatized fog, suspended on nearly invisible tungsten filament over a shallow reflecting pool of ethically sourced glacial meltwater.

  • Every hour, one sphere flashes a faint led light.
  • The installation requires a climate-controlled environment where the temperature must remain at exactly 19.3°C, or the fog collapses and the piece is considered metaphorically and financially dead.
  • Insurance requires a daily recording of the reflections’ symmetry on the meltwater surface.

Sequence of Events

1. Entry and Disguise (18:22)

CCTV footage shows the suspect entering the gallery ahead of the evening private viewing. He was dressed in a shimmering silver bodysuit and wore a papier-mâché helmet shaped like a stoic Venetian pigeon, claiming to be a last-minute addition to the exhibition’s “Living Form” programme.

He carried:

  • A duffel bag labeled “Do Not Open This Bag”
  • A portable fog machine
  • 37 helium balloons tied to his waist
  • A clipboard printed with “Official Gallery Business” in Comic Sans

Security allowed him entry, saying in their defence: “This is Mayfair. It’s not even the strangest thing we’ve seen this week.”

2. Approach to the Artwork (18:47)

The suspect positioned himself by Suspended Doubt No. 4 and announced, in a whisper described by witnesses as “aggressively theatrical,” that he would begin a “spatial reinterpretation exercise.”

He then attempted to detach the glass spheres by slowly floating upward using the helium balloons, reaching just high enough to unhook the first tungsten filament. Unfortunately for him, the gallery’s microclimate stability system detected the gentle air disturbance from the balloons and triggered a “Stage 2 Atmospheric Concern Alert.”

This lowered the room’s lighting to “panic blue” and initiated an automatic lockdown of the installation area.

3. The Fog Machine Miscalculation (18:53)

Realizing he needed a distraction, the suspect activated his fog machine at maximum output. The gallery,already filled with fog from the artwork,became so opaque that witnesses reported feeling “like they were trapped inside a conceptual metaphor for confusion.”

However, his fog machine was fragranced with wild strawberry, which violently clashed with the artwork’s custom “anxiety rosemary” scent. This triggered the environmental integrity sensors, which activated the Emergency Meltwater Preservation Fans.

The resulting cross-breeze launched the suspect sideways into the reflecting pool with a splash described as “shockingly ungraceful.”

4. Detainment (18:59)

As the fog dissipated, the suspect attempted to escape by crawling toward the exit, balloon cluster still attached to his belt. A low-hanging track light snagged the balloons, suspending the suspect half a metre above the ground, rotating slowly like a confused chandelier.

Security detained him gently due to the fragile nature of his papier-mâché pigeon helmet.

Damage Assessment

  • All 14 glass spheres remain intact.
  • Meltwater pool contamination: moderate; two litres replaced.
  • Ambient scent profile temporarily compromised but restored after 90 minutes.
  • No lasting harm to the conceptual integrity of the installation (confirmed by artist).

Conclusion

The attempted theft, though theatrically executed, ultimately failed due to the suspect’s gross underestimation of climate control systems and the physical limitations of helium balloons. The Pimlico Wilde Gallery has since updated its entry protocol to include a “No Unexpected Performance Artists” clause and mandatory fog-machine declarations at the entrance.

The Absolute Disclosure of Liora Vey: Art as Relentless Truth-Telling

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The Absolute Disclosure of Liora Vey: Art as Relentless Truth-Telling

In a time when much of contemporary art appears veiled in irony, coded aesthetics, or self-protective distance, the practice of Liora Vey (b. 1984, Antwerp) cuts through with a disarming,and often deeply unsettling,directness. Vey’s work is not visual in any traditional sense; it is the act of saying everything she thinks, unfiltered, no matter the situation. The medium is language, but the form is closer to performance, to intervention, to lived experiment. What emerges is both a singular body of work and a mirror that reflects the instability, absurdity, and madness latent in us all.

The Practice of Disclosure

Vey’s “performances” occur without announcement. At an exhibition opening, she might murmur aloud: “Everyone here is pretending to understand this painting, but they are mostly waiting for the wine.” At a hospital bedside, she has been documented saying: “You are afraid you are dying, but what frightens me is that I will one day sit here too.” In the middle of a residency interview panel, she once announced: “I want the grant, but I also want you to know that I resent needing your approval.”

Every setting becomes a stage; every thought becomes uttered material. Unlike scripted performance, these disclosures are improvised and inescapably real. Vey’s art is not about building a world, but about tearing down the buffers we usually maintain between thought and speech. The audience, if we can even call them that, is implicated,sometimes complicit, sometimes horrified, often laughing nervously.

Historical Echoes

Vey’s practice can be traced through a lineage of radical honesty in art. One hears faint echoes of Diogenes the Cynic, who defied convention by doing in public what others would conceal. In the 20th century, Vey’s brutal transparency recalls the confessional literature of Sylvia Plath or the raw psychoanalytic performances of Marina Abramović, yet Vey goes further: there is no frame, no “time for art” versus “time for life.” The piece is ongoing, indistinguishable from living.

If the Situationists sought to collapse the boundary between art and everyday life, Vey collapses the boundary between thought and speech. If Fluxus artists embraced chance operations, she embraces the uncontrollable slipstream of cognition itself.

The Madness in Us All

To listen to Vey is to encounter not just her mind, but the mechanism of thought we all share,desires, pettiness, cruelty, love, shame. She exposes the psychic “noise” we suppress in order to remain social beings. In doing so, she reminds us that sanity itself is performative, a consensus held together by restraint.

Critics have accused her of cruelty, of violating the private sphere. Yet Vey insists: “I am not cruel. I am only transparent. The cruelty is already there, inside us.” The discomfort is not generated by her words, but by their resonance with our own hidden interior monologues.

A Radical Continuation

Liora Vey’s project is one of uncompromising fidelity to thought itself. In an era of branding, self-editing, and algorithmic curation, her refusal to filter may be the most radical gesture available. Like the Dadaists mocking reason, or Bas Jan Ader embracing the tragic vulnerability of falling, Vey embodies the unpresentable truth of human contradiction.

Her art is not a call for everyone to “speak their mind,” but a revelation of what it means if we did: a world where love confesses jealousy, where admiration reveals contempt, where mourning admits relief. It is a reminder that beneath our carefully wrought performances of self, there is a cacophony waiting to break through.

Davos: Cows, Clouds, Carpets

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The greatest conceptual artist working today has made another masterpiece. Pimlico Wilde are pleased to present Cows, Clouds, Carpets to the market.

Year: 2025

Medium: Fog brought from the mid-Atlantic, two borrowed dairy cows (rotated weekly), three flying carpets (grounded by health and safety), sandwiches (triangular), and a ceiling painted to look like the floor.

Dimensions: Constantly shifting.

Davos’ “Cows, Clouds, Carpets” presents itself as a meditation on weight and levity, earth and sky, udder and ether. Visitors enter the gallery to discover two cows placidly grazing on a carpet of artificial turf. Above them, three ornate Persian flying carpets should hover. A wall text explains that owing to health and safety restrictions, the carpets have had to be placed on the ground, the visitor must imagine them in flight.

A little mid-Atlantic fog is gently released every 47 seconds, obscuring visibility and encouraging visitors to step gingerly, lest they mistake a cow for a carpet or vice versa. The ceiling has been painted with meticulous trompe-l’œil to resemble the gallery floor, leaving some viewers unsure whether they are standing on the ground at all.

A small tray of sandwiches, replenished daily, rests on a low plinth near the entrance. They are triangular, crustless, and entirely untouched. They are both offering and warning.

“When we are no longer sure what is beneath us, we may finally understand what it means to float.”

, Davos

The cows, borrowed (not hired, this is important) from a farm in Kent, provide a necessary grounding element: slow, heavy, deliberate presences that counterbalance the illusory weightlessness being imagined above.

The sandwiches play a less obvious but no less important role. The artist insists they are not for eating. They represent sustenance denied, a reminder that conceptual nourishment is rarely digestible. Their triangular form, Davos claims, echoes both pyramid and wedge: “Forms that aspire, but never quite arrive.”

The fog ensures the work is never seen in full clarity, suggesting that understanding is always partial and that cows, too, can be ethereal if conditions permit.

Visitor Guidelines:

• Do not attempt to ride the carpets, no matter how strong the temptation.

• The cows may look approachable. They are not.

• Please do not eat the sandwiches. Buyable sandwiches are available in the café.

• If you lose your sense of up and down, sit quietly until the fog clears.

Price: £1.4 million (including painted ceiling and contractual rights to temporarily borrow cows. NB: the fog is not included and will have to be sourced separately by the purchaser.

Limited Edition Artifact: A triangular sandwich cast in resin (edition of 25), available for £190,000 each.

Critics’ Reactions:

• The Welsh Art Magazine : “A sublime balance between bovine mass and mystical lift.”

• The Harewood Guardian: “I watched a cow stare at a carpet for ten minutes. Magica; I left convinced of art’s continuing power.”

With “Cows, Clouds, Carpets”, Davos offers a profound, solemn meditation on the tension between heaviness and flight, sustenance and illusion, cow and carpet.

The Most Expensive Conceptual Artworks Ever Sold

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By Lydia Voss-Hammond

Conceptual art has always asked big questions: What is art? Who decides? Can you invoice someone for an idea? As it turns out, yes , and often for millions.

Below are the most outrageously expensive conceptual artworks ever sold, proof that in today’s art market, a compelling concept can be worth more than gold.

1. Untitled (The Artist Is Not Present) , £6.3 million

Artist: Lucca Vonn

Sold: 2023, Basel

Lucca Vonn’s minimalist masterstroke involved renting an empty gallery space, placing a single folding chair in the middle, and… not showing up. For three months. The gallery posted daily updates confirming the artist’s continued absence.

The buyer received:

• A legal certificate of absence

• A guestbook signed by confused viewers

• The folding chair (optional, extra £20,000 for insurance)

Collectors called it “a haunting exploration of ego and expectation.” Critics called it “an invoice with lighting.” The market called it: SOLD.

2. NFTitled #1 (Now Fungible Tomorrow)

Artist: Gl!tch.eth

Sold: 2021

An NFT that was self-aware enough to predict its own irrelevance. This looping 12-second video featured a slowly pixelating Ethereum logo, overlaid with the text:

“This will be worthless by the time you brag about buying it.”

Despite its cynicism , or perhaps because of it , it sparked a bidding war among crypto collectors. Its value later crashed to 40p and then mysteriously rebounded to £47 million after Gl!tch.eth tweeted: “I’m deleting my wallet.”

Still considered the only NFT to successfully roast its own buyer.

3. Untitled (You Thought It Was Included) , £4.9 million

Artist: Delia Flux

Sold: 2020

This piece made headlines when a collector paid nearly £5 million for what they believed was a monumental glass sculpture , only to discover the sculpture was not included in the sale. What was included? A printed receipt stating:

“Ownership is the illusion. Thank you for participating.”

Flux later clarified in an artist’s note: “The sculpture exists emotionally, not legally.” The collector reportedly wept for 40 minutes, then put on a brave face, called it “the most powerful thing I’ve ever bought,” and tried to sell it immediately on the secondary market.

4. Silence, Auctioneer , £4.3 million

Artist: Milton Perchton

Sold: 2024

The concept: a work sold during a real auction, in total silence. No bidding, no names, no numbers , just a quiet nod from a buyer and a muted tap from a gavel made of felt. The piece was described as “a rebellion against spectacle” and “a slow clap in art form.”

Nothing physical changed hands. The buyer received a notarized video of the silent auction and a small wooden block labeled “Proof of Presence.”

Rumor has it another bidder tried to “out-silence” the buyer with a stronger nod but was disqualified for blinking.

5. Enormous Pile of Money #6

Artist: Hedge Fund

Sold: 2025, Pimlico Wilde

We couldn’t leave this one out. The artist Hedge Fund , conceptual art’s shadowy high priest of profit , sold a digital, data-driven rendering of a pile of money that inflates and deflates in real time with global markets. Collectors own fractional shares; the pile grows if capitalism thrives, shrinks if it falters.

Described by one critic as “Warhol with a calculator,” and by a hedge fund manager as “relatable.”

Included in the purchase:

• A VR headset

• A market-linked music score for the harpsichord.

• And the distinct feeling you’ve been both mocked and immortalized

Honourable Mention: Empty Frame With Price Tag Still Attached , £1.2 million

Artist: Unknown

Sold: Also unknown

Was it a prank? A mistake? A masterwork of minimalist irony? We may never know. But someone bought it , and the market applauded.

Conclusion

Conceptual art isn’t about what you see , it’s about what you paid to believe you saw. And if that belief costs millions, well, that’s just part of the concept.

Pimlico Wilde Welcomes Conceptual Artist My Friend Leslie

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In a bold move that underscores its commitment to emerging conceptual voices, Pimlico Wilde gallery has announced the representation of the artist known simply as My Friend Leslie. The appointment signals not merely an addition to the gallery’s roster, but a deliberate expansion of its philosophical and aesthetic parameters. Leslie’s work,elusive yet sharply intelligent,inhabits a liminal space between sociological critique and poetic ephemerality, unsettling the viewer’s relationship to medium, language, and narrative.

My Friend Leslie, whose adopted moniker serves as both mask and provocation, has cultivated a practice that resists formal classification. Oscillating between installation, performance, ephemeral textworks, and détourned archival materials, her oeuvre is fundamentally concerned with the mechanisms of memory, authorship, and the social architectures that underpin emotional life. She is, in the most rigorous sense, a conceptualist: uninterested in objects per se, yet deeply invested in the cultural and psychic residues they leave behind.

Her 2023 piece Do Not Archive This Moment,a time-based installation involving shredded family photographs, bureaucratic signage, and live recitations of deliberately misremembered diary entries,garnered critical attention for its deft interweaving of personal trauma with state machinery. The work eschews sentimentality while exposing the undercurrents of surveillance and erasure within domestic narrative. It is emblematic of Leslie’s deftness with affect: her capacity to evoke discomfort without melodrama, intimacy without confession.

Though her visual language is sparse,often drawing on the aesthetics of instructional design, corporate minimalism, and mid-century psychoanalytic texts,Leslie’s work vibrates with a dense polyphony of allusion. She cites influences as diverse as Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Sophie Calle, and the Situationists, yet her approach feels distinctly her own: playful, unsettling, intellectually rigorous.

It is perhaps in her linguistic interventions that Leslie is most radical. In a recent series titled Pronouns for Future Use, she constructs sculptural texts from found legal documents, then alters their grammar to propose alternate subjectivities. The resulting pieces,a series of lacquered aluminum placards and performative readings,navigate the border between semantic disruption and identity politics. They ask not only what is said, but who may say it, and when.

Pimlico Wilde’s Director of Semantics, Amaya Rens, described the gallery’s decision as “a necessary alignment with a voice we believe will be foundational in the next phase of conceptual practice.” She continued: “Leslie’s work is not about novelty; it is about re-inscribing meaning into the banal, the disavowed, and the illegible. She has a gift for revealing the unseen logic beneath everyday systems.”

The gallery’s inaugural exhibition of Leslie’s work, This Was Never Yours to Name, opens this autumn. While details remain tightly guarded, hints suggest an immersive textual environment drawing on defunct legal codes, anonymous chat transcripts, and a rare 17th-century printer’s manual. True to form, Leslie will offer no opening remarks and will not be present at the opening.

This deliberate evasiveness is not, as some critics have lazily proposed, a gesture of obscurantism. Rather, it reflects a belief in the autonomy of ideas, their capacity to circulate beyond biography or brand. In a cultural moment increasingly tethered to visibility and personal disclosure, My Friend Leslie’s refusal to comply may be her most urgent gesture yet.

With her addition to Pimlico Wilde, the gallery becomes not only a platform but a participant in Leslie’s project,one that is likely to continue challenging the comfort zones of curators, collectors, and audiences alike. As contemporary art grapples with its own complicit structures, artists like Leslie are not merely welcome; they are indispensable.

Reflections on the famous New York exhibition of My Friend Leslie

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In the spring of 2019, My Friend Leslie staged a widely discussed and critically divisive solo exhibition at the Fenwick Museum of Art entitled Apparitions in the Civic Realm. Heralded by some as “a palimpsest of the post-liberal imaginary” and dismissed by others as “deliberately inaccessible,” the exhibition marked the artist’s most ambitious and conceptually rigorous foray into institutional space to date.

Comprising three floors of minimal yet emotionally charged interventions, Apparitions resisted the conventional logic of spatial coherence or narrative progression. Visitors entered through a narrow vestibule coated in matte legal blue,a hue My Friend Leslie later identified as “borrowed from obsolete zoning maps of Queens.” Within this space, wall-mounted QR codes led to intentionally dead or redirected links, a gesture that many interpreted as a meditation on epistemic instability and the disorientation of digital archival systems. This introductory environment established a central concern of the exhibition: the erosion of legibility under late bureaucratic capitalism.

Perhaps the most discussed component of the show was the tripartite installation Public Secrets (2018), which occupied the museum’s fifth floor. Here, My Friend Leslie juxtaposed deaccessioned urban planning models from the 1960s with a series of hand-transcribed psychiatric intake forms sourced,according to the museum’s label,from a now-defunct therapeutic community in upstate New York. The forms, scrawled in delicate graphite on vellum, were layered over repurposed municipal signage reading “No Loitering,” “Authorized Personnel Only,” and the ambiguous “Subject to Inspection.” The cumulative effect was one of ethical vertigo: viewers found themselves implicated in a system of quiet surveillance even as they were invited to empathize with its casualties.

As critic LaDonna Merriweather noted in July, My Friend Leslie’s practice here enacted “a form of conceptual counter-archives, wherein personal testimony is not revealed but displaced, its legibility contingent on the viewer’s own complicity.”¹

Equally striking was the series of time-based performances that occurred without formal scheduling or announcement. Entitled Unscheduled Lives, these involved uniformed performers,hired through a temp agency,wandering the museum reciting fragments of local administrative code in affectless tones. Their presence, indistinguishable at times from security staff, troubled the boundaries between art, labour, and institutional authority. The performances’ refusal to “stage” themselves was emblematic of My Friend Leslie’s larger refusal to provide resolution or spectacle.

A subtler, yet no less incisive work was Indexical Drift (2017,18), a set of 24 microfilm viewers arranged in a grid across a dimly lit gallery. Inside each, viewers could peruse fragments of letters, obituaries, and inventory manifests,all anonymized and redacted beyond decipherability. The flickering of the film loops created a durational hum, suggestive of bureaucratic fatigue and archival entropy. It is a testament to My Friend Leslie’s conceptual precision that these pieces conveyed so much through so little: a kind of anti-monumentality charged with quiet defiance.

Reception of the exhibition was sharply polarized. The New Liverpool Times praised My Friend Leslie’s “brutal subtlety” and her capacity to “aestheticize absence without romanticising it,”² while others accused the work of “aestheticized opacity verging on institutional satire.”³ Yet even detractors conceded the show’s intellectual rigor and undeniable affective power.

My Friend Leslie, in keeping with her practice, made no public comment on the exhibition and refused all interviews. In place of a press release, the gallery issued a statement reading simply: “The artist has nothing to add.”

What remains of Apparitions in the Civic Realm is not a set of objects, but a set of conditions: a destabilized visitor, a murky authority, a network of disavowed speech acts. Like much of My Friend Leslie’s work, the exhibition will resist traditional forms of remembrance, and perhaps that is its most enduring gesture.

¹ LaDonna Merriweather, “Outtakes from the Civic Archive,” October, no. 189 (Fall 2024): 66.

² Holland Cotter, “The Absences Speak Louder Than Words,” The New York Times, April 14, 2024.

³ Alex Greenberger, “What’s She Hiding? Conceptual Obfuscation at the Whitney,” Artforum, May 2024.

The Last Frame is Yours

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Medium: 127-hour single-channel video, involuntary audience participation, signed NDAs, mandatory reflective silence.

Screening Format: 16K digital projection, no subtitles.

Runtime: 5 days, 7 hours, 12 minutes. No intermissions.

The Last Frame is Yours is not a film. It is a commitment, a test, a sentence. At 127 hours in length, the piece obliterates the notion of passive spectatorship, demanding total submission from its audience. Gallery-goers must sign a waiver before entering, acknowledging their understanding that no one is permitted to leave until the final frame has been seen.

The film’s structure is elusive: a meandering collage of unedited security footage, flickering landscapes filmed at one frame per hour, actors reading novels in languages they don’t understand with deliberate hesitation, and entire stretches of black screen where the only soundtrack is the lo-res recording of a someone filling a car with petrol. At irregular intervals, a clock appears, but it does not tell the time.

Viewers are provided with a single, numbered blanket and a deliberately uncomfortable chair. Meals are served in near silence, consisting of a thin broth and dry crackers, a menu devised in collaboration with sleep deprivation researchers. At night (though time loses meaning quickly), pre-recorded voices murmur speculative reflections on the nature of endings, though it is never clear who is speaking.

Davos insists the audience must earn the final frame. Only those who endure the full experience are granted the right to see it. What happens in the last moment remains unknown,viewers sign an NDA and are forbidden from discussing it outside the screening.

Artist Statement:

“This work is a short film that I have worked on whilst researching my magnum opus, a 300 hour feature filmed on Hampstead Heath called Fred Astaire goes to Space.”

, Davos

Curator’s Notes:

This work is the culmination of a career-long investigation into the intersection of time, endurance, and the collapse of voluntary engagement. With The Last Frame is Yours, he transcends conventional filmic expectations, creating a piece that is at once cinematic, sculptural, and carceral.

Drawing from the durational legacies of Warhol’s Empire and Douglas Gordon’s 24 Hour Psycho, but stripping away the safety of optional departure, Davos forces the viewer into a state of radical submission. The fluctuating pace,sometimes glacial, sometimes violently abrupt,mirrors the psychological erosion of captivity, though unlike most imprisonment, this is one the audience has chosen.

The final frame, withheld until total surrender, serves as both punishment and reward. Those who reach it emerge transformed, though no one can say exactly how.

Visitor Guidelines:

• Once admitted, attendees may not leave until the screening is complete.

• Bathroom breaks are allowed, but must be taken in silent, single-file procession, monitored by a gallery attendant.

• No external timekeeping devices are permitted. Phones must be left outside.

• At the end of the screening, attendees are required to sit in silent reflection for one hour before departure.

Price: £1,750,000 (includes blanket, numbered certificate of completion, and exclusive access to a single still from the final frame).

Limited Edition Prints: A series of five images from indeterminate points in the film, titled You Were Here, But When?, is available for £250,000 each.

Critics’ Reactions:

• Sally Quant: “A relentless, unforgiving masterpiece.”

• Michel Downton: “Davos has done what no filmmaker has dared: he has made time itself the antagonist.”

• The Torquay Guardian: “I lasted 84 hours before I broke and was carried to A and E on a passing window-cleaner’s ladder. I can never know what I missed. This will haunt me forever.”

The Last Frame is Yours is not a film you watch. It is a film you survive.