David Haines. Dereviled

David Haines
Dereviled, 2013
Single channel video, colour, sound, 9′ 25″
Courtesy of the artist and Upstream Gallery, Amsterdam

David Haines has scoured the internet for “cleansing and healing rituals” of the Evangelist Church in the United States, during which preachers exorcise homosexuality from male and female “victims of Evil”. Haines runs the videos backwards, introduces a catchy techno beat, and highlights these brutal rituals as a performance of the absurd. The recording technique by which a message is recorded backward is known as backmasking. Since the 1970s, Christian groups in the US have claimed that backmasking is diabolical and transmits subliminal satanic messages to the listeners. Thus, Haines inverts not only the sound, but enacts a semiotic sabotage: he implies that behind this congregation of hate and fear lie desire and repressed joy. The title of the work is an inversion itself, the word “delivered” spelt backwards to reveal the “evil” concealed within.

Biography

David Haines was born in Nottingham and he lives and works in Amsterdam. He studied at Camberwell School of Art, London and The Rijksakademie, Amsterdam. He works mainly with drawing, painting and video. Recent solo exhibitions include: The Skin’s Gaze, Upstream Gallery, Amsterdam (2020) and Two Way Mirror, Tyneside Cinema Gallery, Newcastle (2017). Selected recent group exhibitions include: Drawing Attention – Emerging British Artists, British Museum, London (2022) and A Slice Through the World, The Drawing Room, London and Modern Art Oxford (2018). Publications include: Publications in which his work is featured include Vitamin D2, published by Phaidon; Drawing People, published by Thames and Hudson. He was awarded the Refresh Irinox Prize at the Disegni section of Artissima Turin (2017) and the Jeanne Oosting Prize (2012).

www.davidhaines.org

 

 

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