If They saw U,

They would conceive me,

a thing attached, enlivened

buried, in your skin

without defence or pretence,

(((((nestled)))))

 

-           Jennifer Lauren Martin

 

 

Under the pink of my tongue, I found love exposes a single, raw nerve extracted from the flesh of a film currently in development by Jennifer Lauren Martin. The short film collapses the genres of reality television and artists' film, heightening the tensions at play in their conflicts and overlap to a frenetic pitch of emotion. Lauren Martin offers us a critical and poetic narrative window into a format which succeeds based on our appetite for its anti-narrative pretence, holding the explosive moment in early 00’s popular culture which gave us the free-falling candour of Big Brother or Flavor of Love (which now seems impossibly carnal) against the slick skin of Love Island’s masterful manipulation of television production. At stake in expressing this meta-narrative, is the surgical exposition of how the totalising effects of selfhood choke and struggle against the open field of desire. Lauren Martin asks us to witness the extreme edge of the self as it convulses into the inflamed, fizzing skin of ultra-self-awareness.

 

Under the pink begins to speculatively explore what the logical consequences might be for this genre, taking into consideration the increased velocity of our appetite for the diversification of popular media. In this installation, Lauren Martin brings us inside the cybernetic currents of the film, presenting a series of monologues made by its central character, Aida. Aida must compete for the affections of both her fellow contestants and the audience, caught in a game of performativity that mercilessly elides the distinctions between her desires and her identity. Similarly, our position as audience is trapped and distorted in these collapsing contexts as we become aware that we are, in a sense, watching the consequences of our consumptive habits play out.

 

Punched into the wall above our heads is Lauren Martin's sculptural skylight— a kind of cunning scapegoat for the exhibition's absence of visual matter. The intervention produces a tight control on the amount of light let into the space, hyper-rendering the boundary between inside and outside, a histrionically enacted aperture that implicates our participation in the surveilled atmosphere permeating the work. It is at once a projector, a crude, giant pinhole camera and an anaemic view of the “real” world outside, looming over the darkened interior world of the monologues. A presence that is indifferent yet obsessed, intimate yet dissociated.

 

Text by Christopher Kirubi

 

​

​

Jennifer Lauren Martin (b. 1990, US/UK) lives and works in London. Her films have screened in competition at festivals, including British Shorts Berlin, Berlin (2022), BlackStar, Philadelphia (2021), SOUL Fest, London (2021), Alchemy Film and Moving Image, Hawick (2021), Montréal International Documentary Festival, Montréal (2020), Kasseler Dokfest, Kassel (2020), and European Media Art Festival, Osnabrück (2019). Recent solo exhibitions and commissions include TEETH, Primary, Nottingham (2020); Channel 6, Turf Projects, London (2019); Britain Been Rotten, Cypher BILLBOARDS, London (2019). Recent fellowships and residencies include Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Madison (2022), Momentum: We Are Parable x Channel 4, London (2022), Hospitalfield, Arbroath (2021), Kingsgate Workshops, London (2020), FLAMIN Fellowship, London (2020), and Chisenhale Studio4, London (2017). Martin was named a Film London Lodestar Artist Filmmaker (2021) and won Best Screenplay at SOUL Fest for TEETH (2020). She is the co-director of the London-based black and POC-led artist workers' cooperative not/nowhere, specialising in analogue film.

​

​

​

A transcript of the monologues in Jennifer Lauren Martin’s sound piece Under the pink of my tongue, I found love is available by scanning the QR code below:

​

​

​

​

​

​