Cast

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Set in the UK and Germany, this video work was made during a six-month fellowship at Künstlerhaus Schloss Balmoral in Bad Ems, a spa town frequented for health reasons in the 19th century by visitors such as Gogol, Turgenev and Dostoyevsky and subsequently a favourite stopover for Hitler during WW2. In local tours, Hitler’s presence in the town is largely written out of local history. Coutts wrote a script for the video, following four obsessive months of reading novels and watching films that deal with memory, erasure, sickness and appropriation. The script appearing in text form through the film is combined with revisited scenes from Federico Fellini’s ‘Amacord’ (1973) and Hollis Frampton’s ‘Nostalgia’ (1971). With excerpts from Jorge Luis Borges’ ‘The Aleph’ (1970) and Thomas Mann’s ‘The Magic Mountain’ (1924), Coutts autofictions a story of a woman’s patchy memory of a man losing his mind.
‘Cast’ was first shown at Künstlerhaus Schloss Balmoral (2010) as part of a group show of the eight selected Fellows and was featured and reviewed on the German TV channel Mittelrhein (2010). It was screened in the group show ‘Doris’ at StedeFreund, Berlin (2010), and included in Coutts’s solo exhibition, ‘Millions Like Us’ at Danielle Arnaud Contemporary Art, London (2011). The work was selected for the Salon Video Prize at Matt Roberts, London (2011).

Accompanying the show at Künstlerhaus Schloss Balmoral, Coutts’s bookwork ‘Thought Sequence’ (Argo Books, Berlin, 2011)

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