description

Drawn from Forced Entertainment’s work Emanuelle Enchanted (1992), Cardboard Sign Photographs explores the group’s obsession with identity as a shifting, contradictory site and with the strangely charged act of naming and renaming.

In the images, five performers appear and reappear in costumes drawn from a vast store of jumble-sale clothing. Endlessly renamed from a catalogue of cardboard signs—ranging from FRANK (DRUNK) and THE HYPNOTISED GIRL, to JACK RUBY and A STEWARDESS FORGETTING HER DIVORCE — the performers explore these fictional possibilities. All the while, the real exteriors in which they are photographed take on the qualities of both film sets and theatrical backdrops.

© Hugo Glendinning/Forced Entertainment 1992. Photographs.