Western Society

Gob Squad Arts Collective

How happy are you on a scale of 1 to 10? How middle-class are you? One-night stand or masturbation? Your children or your career? Welcome to the living room of “Western Society”. For Gob Squad – the almost legendary live art masters of playing with video and reality – a neglected video on the internet becomes their window to an anonymous family celebration somewhere on the outskirts of the western world. They look through the window and at themselves. Passionately, they decrypt and take apart the home video, they put it together again and again until the moving image of a dysfunctional society emerges that still plays by the rules of past times.
Gob Squad, dressed to kill, seek to revive this short moment of reality, and project themselves into the image once more. And while they look for answers as to how all this could have happened and where the happiness went, some spectators have a chance in a lifetime to become a part of that golden, shining picture.
“Western Society” is inviting and isolating. Heaven and hell. Nightmare to some, a place of desire to others. Too true, too fake, too familiar, too strange. The nostalgic portrait of a society, that actually doesn’t exist any more, that can’t exist any more, that mustn’t exist any more – and yet this society stages itself again and again, it refuses to cease to exist. The party goes on, always somewhere else and despite everything.

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