Richard Hards, What kind of tone is that?, 2014, Courtesy of the artist

Richard Hards

b. 1985, Bermondsey

2012-2014 MA Sculpture, Royal College of Art, London
2005-2008 BA Fine Art, Goldsmiths College, London

Recent Exhibitions

Solo Shows:
2014 ‘One eye is enough’, Beaconsfield, London

Group shows:
2015 ‘Up a tree’, Flat Deux, London
2015 ‘Cuts to violence’, Sunday screenings at CCC, London
2014 ‘Camaradas’, Museo Experimental El Eco, Mexico City, Mexican Embassy, London
2013 ‘Four Scenarios’, Bermondsey Project Space, London
2013 ‘Rushgrove House’, Rushgrove House, London
2013 ‘Addendum (On the shortness of life)’, Red Gallery, London, AVU, Prague

Awards and Residencies:
2014 Villiers David Bursary, Royal College of Art, London

Artist’s Statement

My work exists principally as a practice of intervention – impositions that seek to question the pretensions and hierarchies of their given contexts. Many of these have been physical disturbances and blunt provocations. When I removed a floor, it was better to not ask for permission. When motors hammered away at the windows of a studio building, nobody’s work could escape the sound. The processes involved can strain relationships with other artists and curators, and it is often difficult to distinguish between provocations that fall within the work and those that drift outside it.

More recently the impositions I have produced occupy a less tangible space, using video and sound to achieve the same sense of disruption. I am interested in the ways in which we measure our own relationships, socially, physically and emotionally against architecture, and how those behaviours can be disrupted. With this in mind, I like the ways in which strategies of film and video have the capacity to distort, suffocate and manipulate an audience’s relationship with narrative space, inside and outside of the cinema.

'What kind of tone is that?' is a video that intersperses a screentest with the actor Arno Frisch with homemade CCTV footage of an incident on a housing estate in London. Frisch reads from a script that recounts my relationship to the video.