Alex Kershaw

About the artist

Working in video installation, film and photography, my practice involves long-term engagements with communities whose subjectivities are constituted through their relationships with the natural world. My work integrates ethnographic method with performative and cinematic genres, where subjects are not simply observed via the camera, but cast as ‘actors’ playing versions of themselves. Rather than recording ‘reality’ or simply manufacturing fictions, my work provokes an alternative reality that is then documented. Quotidian rituals are the portal through which we witness the work’s subjects making sense of their world in order to better cope within it. Thus, while the camera is my tool, the social body is my primary medium. In studying entanglements between humans, non-human animals and their ecosystems, I render their material and somatic realities beyond ideological articulations and discursive inscriptions. In this crisscrossing between meaning and matter, subjectivities are co-produced in worlds that no longer belong only to humans.