BLACK WHOLE (RMX) restages an imaginary cabaret performed by an unidentified Officer: he is at once a ghost, a dream and a traumatic symptom.

Richard Strauss’s opera Ariadne auf Naxos (1916) acts as a self-nesting framework for this meta-fictional allegory about art, sex, death and childhood. Against the silent commentary of old master paintings, arias by Handel and Vivaldi are ‘mistranslated’ by texts adapted from Octave Mirbeau’s  ‘The Torture Garden’ (1899).

No relations in the work are straightforward: here there is in fact no immediate relation at all between sound and vision. The artist finds pleasure in the way all these elements ‘rub up’ against one another. Everything that might normally be synchronised is displaced or distorted. Perversion is the law, and pleasure executes the sentence: sumptuous surfaces delight in the shattering of the self.