The 20th Birthday exhibition

The exhibition

Created specially for the KunstenFESTIVALdesArts, this exhibition is a playful and provocative essay in photographs and words combining text from artistic director Tim Etchells and images from photographer Hugo Glendinning, who has collaborated with and documented Forced Entertainment’s work throughout their twenty year history.

Its topic is the company, the work and the themes and ideas that are so important to it - the contemporary world, identity, landscape, memory, truth, fiction.

At first the texts and images appear to be a chaotic accumulation of stories, moods, tones, scenes, costumes and events spanning twenty years of the company’s history. Jumping backwards and forwards in time, there’s no clear chronological or logical progression through the pieces. Some images and texts are clear and detailed, while others are more partial and resolutely incomplete.

Unfolding from within this fragmented and disjointed assembly, however, is a deeper narrative – an exploration of the personal and group memory of the company and the themes that it has long addressed.

Imaginary Evidence

Imaginary Evidence is an interactive essay-cum-archive on CD-ROM from Forced Entertainment that circles around the work and working process of the company. The piece layers documentary footage, fiction, home-movies, sound, show-clips, anecdote, theory, interviews and text by Tim Etchells and Forced Entertainment to create a unique interactive exploration of the group’s work, its methods and its pre-occupations.

The collision of oppositional ideas, the juxtaposition of sense and non-sense, the drift from, around and to a point are its modus operandi. There is no correct sequence for Imaginary Evidence which is as much a landscape of ideas as it is a regular essay. These ideas, textures, facts and evidence can endlessly be re-sequenced, re-contextualised and, by implication, re-made.

The CD-ROM also includes a full archive of the company’s projects, providing a further layer of facts and information about the company’s work.

Imaginary Evidence can be seen at our festival centre in the Beursschouwburg.

The book of the 20th Birthday: Not Even a Game Anymore

On the occasion of its twentieth anniversary, a book of essays, analyses, personal reports and many photographs from renowned scholars, journalists and artists is being published for the first time.

This is the first book which gathers key information about Forced Entertainment’s history and work alongside essays by internationally renowned writers from around the world, and includes some of the remarkable photographic documentation of the company’s work by Hugo Glendinning: a stimulating book which can equally serve as an introduction to Forced Entertainment and their work, an in-depth academic reader and an invaluable collection of material for fans.