STEPHEN HONEGGER AND ANTHONY HUNT: CONTAINER
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A full-scale replica of a shipping container declared an insistent, industrial sculptural presence. A computer-modeled DVD projection on the inside of the container encouraged visitors to enter a simulated modular space in which the studio complex and gallery itself was reconstructed, and viewers cast as first-person participants. The internal video narrative unfolded, as in a computer game, towards a violent denouement, in which real and virtual time and space collided, with viewers complicit in the covert event. Honegger and Hunt’s exceptional and critically acclaimed installation amplified issues related to gaming logic and its relationship to the analogue and digital, the virtual and the real, the model and its subject. Container, as critic Daniel Palmer observed, was ‘simultaneously alienating and delicious, [adding] a rich new dimension to the idea of site specificity, the gallery, and indeed to the tradition of participatory art’.