Sex Tape
Sex Tape, 2023
Stainless steel, laminated glass, USB drive, video
W110 x L70 x H32.5 cm
Edition 1 of 1
“With Sex Tape, we ask our audience what they really want from us and ask ourselves what we really want to give. It's about boundaries and temptation, vulnerability, and the self-perpetuated commodification of our relationship.” - Excerpt from exhibition artist statement.
Excerpt from Coveal Magazine interview:
You've spoken about pushing boundaries between your private life and your work with 'Sex Tape.' Could you share more about the internal conversations and decision-making that led to this exploration, and how you managed the emotional aspects of merging these typically separate spheres?
This piece was scary as fuck to make. I’m still not sure if it was a good idea and at the same time I think it’s my favourite thing that we’ve done.
This was a very personal piece in that it was a tool for us to figure something out about our practice and our lives. We had been talking a lot about how present we want to be personally in our ‘brand’ or in what the world receives from us. In the beginning we accepted that in our time it’s a lot easier to have some success if you are the face of your work. But over the course of the last few years, as we got more publicity, we started to feel like it might have been nice to be totally anonymous. Of course the answer is somewhere in between but it can be hard to pinpoint exactly where.
At the same time that we we’re pondering this, our Hong Kong gallery asked us to create something for an upcoming exhibition around the theme of sex. We were sitting in our local cafe talking about what we should do when Ali was like “We should just make a sex tape and seal it in glass”. It was just a kind of intuitive outburst but was also the most direct possible response to the theme of the show while also perfectly capturing this tension we were feeling about how our audience wanted more from us than we actually wanted to give. So we just stuck with that initial impulse and embedded the sex tape in a coffee table because we liked the idea that it could sit in the centre of a home and perpetually tempt its owner. Would they destroy our artwork out of selfish desire to gain access to our inner lives?
In the end the piece has given us a lot more clarity on the boundary between our public and private lives and the answer is that there definitely is a line to be drawn between us and our audience.
Our friend recently overheard in a rave in Hanoi, “I heard about these artists that made a sex tape and sealed it in a coffee table”. People have also stopped us in the street and said “Hey you made that Sex Tape thing right”. It's insane to me to think that people who we’ve never met actually talk about our work like that and it feels great to have made a piece which people find that interesting. Although it’s a strange feeling to be known for your own sex tape.