Alex Kershaw

ALEX KERSHAW uses video and photography to mediate intercultural exchange with people and communities from a specific place. In this process, everyday people become participants and collaborators in the production of the work. Quotidian rituals used to connect, to cope, and to acculturate, provide the subject matter for developing the choreography of people's individual 'performances'. The camera becomes a way of thinking – negotiating the lived experience of Kershaw's participants and his artistic re-imagining of place. Rather than recording 'reality' or manufacturing fictions – he provokes an alternative reality that is then documented. As a result his stylistic approach is a play between performative, cinematic and documentary genres. In this process, people are re-embodied within their own surroundings, shifting their perspectives, revitalising their relationship to place and provoking his audience to reconsider their own assumptions.