Patrick Hough

In his practice Hough deals with critical questions around cinema and history, or more precisely, with how the cinematic interpretation of historic events has the potential to construct new histories with a life of their own. The artist uses film sets and props that were made to play the role of ‘historical artefacts’ in various movies to investigate the issues that arise around the institutional mode of representation in cinema. The relationship between ‘real’ and constructed cinematic narratives is the main conceptual focal point in Hough’s works. Within his work, the artist collapses different times, spaces and history. Not interested in setting the record straight he draws out the ways in which a simulated fictional history, is granted its own historical reality. In a series of films called ‘Object Interviews’ Hough collaborated with several specialists – a curator of Egyptian artefacts from the British Museum, a psychoanalyst and a master prop maker. The diverse subjective interpretations these professionals imparted within the films exposed the multiplicity of times, narratives and histories bound up within these usually mute and lifeless objects.