Gessnerallee
Zürich

«No one is where they are. They are talking to someone miles away. I miss them. But they are missing out.» – Alone Together, Sherry Turkle

In «Western Society» Gob Squad zoom the camera into the heart of Western civilisation. By exploring the internet’s remote darkness, Gob Squad have brought back a tiny satellite: a fairly unspectacular unwatched video of an anonymous living room, of a family gathering somewhere at the edge of the Western world. A picture that appears to be holding everything together that we have achieved. Everything we are, everything that holds us together and that separates us. With all their might, Gob Squad want to bring back into life this little moment of conserved reality. They work and work on it and they search for answers, they project and reconstruct, they decompose the image into its particles and they overwrite it with their own stories and new interpretations. If you’re lucky you can experience the feeling of being alone amidst the others. «Western Society» is a nightmare and a social utopia – too real, too fake, to familiar and too bizarre. A portrait of the society of the 21st century and an eternal party that has to be kept going.

After the success of their work «Before Your Very Eyes» the German-British performance collective comes to the Gessnerallee for the second time.