Tim Etchells
ISEA Bio(s) Available:
Tim Etchells is an artist and a writer, best known for his work as director of Forced Entertainment, one of the UK’s most prominent and long-lived experimental performance groups. Formed in 1984 they were described recently by The Guardian as “Britain’s most brilliant experimental theatre company..” Etchells has written the text for all of the group’s productions and has directed all of them since 1986. He won a Time Out/London Dance and Performance Award for his text for Emanuelle Enchanted (1992/93). In recent years under Etchells’ direction the group has augmented its performances with projects made especially for galleries and unusual sites, most notably a number of works in collaboration with photographer Hugo Glendinning, including “Frozen Palaces” (CD-ROM) and “Ground Plans For Paradise” (installation). The work also includes “Dreams’ Winter” for Manchester Central Library (1995), which was nominated for a Manchester Evening News Theatre Award, and Nights In This City (1995 and 1997), a performance which took place on a coach trip around Sheffield (and later Rotterdam, NL) and ended with an installation in a huge disused bus depot.
In 1998 Etchells led the work on Forced Entertainment’s collaborative writing project on the internet “Paradise”, commissioned by Lovebytes/Channel and open since 23 May. This project invites written contributions from artists and members of the public. Texts and documentations of Etchells’ writing and performance work have been published in diverse places ranging from Art & Design to Language Alive. Etchells has written and published extensively on new performance and installation at conferences, in books and in journals such as Performance Research and Frieze. A collection of his critical/theoretical writing and performance texts titled “Certain Fragments” will be published by Routledge in early 1999. The text for his piece “Quizoola!”, a marathon performance of 2000 questions and answers will be published (in German) by Rowholt in 1998. Documentation of “Ground Plans For Paradise” featured in the most recent edition of the Canadian publication Alphabet City.
