Mathew Parkin | I believe in you

Music by Simon Boase (The Punishment of Luxury)

At the core of I believe in you is a film following a pilgrimage to see a show of Felix Gonzalez-Torres in Belfast. The work combines diaristic footage, including from webcam and iPhone, into a layered exploration of intimacy and a sincere attempt to articulate a personal language of identity and desire. Surrounding this central work, a series of sporadic interventions and rituals alter experiences of the exhibition over time.

Mathew also intervenes in the daily running of the gallery to make its staff renegotiate the speed at which they work; tea and coffee are offered to visitors; the gallery building becomes a speaker; lube is available. Such interventions seek to address the rituals and interplay between artists, galleries and audiences and to encourage a social experience of the exhibition, in which visitors are users rather than spectators. Mathew's creative practice is an ecological activity that responds rigorously and critically to the circumstances of exhibition-making.

Parkin's creative practice is an ecological activity that responds rigorously and critically to the circumstances of exhibition-making. He is interested in how we might articulate the nature of contemporary art galleries as organisations of care, and ways in which the exhibitions housed within them both overlap with and sit apart from their structure and identity. For I believe in you Parkin turns IMT Gallery into an uncertain, multifunctional space; a space grounded in art yet also seeking some other functionality triggered by the creative, speculative enquiry of the artists and visitors that use it.