Douglas Gordon / Philip Venables

World Premiere & Co-Production

Turner-Prize winning artist Douglas Gordon stages a dark musical journey into a world of an emotional state of emergency.

Using a compilation of popular cover songs as a basis, one of the world’s most influential video and installation artists, will develop a stage work about domestic violence in collaboration with British composer Philip Venables. Born in 1979, Venables is a radical musical innovator, whose strikingly visceral compositions have been performed by well-known contemporary music ensembles as for example the London Sinfonietta. In BOUND TO HURT songs by artists as diverse as Carole King, Jacques Brel and Madonna, are re-imagined as surreal fantasies of violence. Douglas Gordon’s characteristic eerie emotional ambivalence is carried into the theatre – a medium in which Gordon has recently started to explore. The performance is written for the extremely versatile singer/performer Ruth Rosenfeld, best known for her collaborations with theatre directors Frank Castorf and Herbert Fritsch. She is accompanied by members of the German-Icelandic Ensemble Adapter, one of the most experimental genre-crossers in New Music. BOUND TO HURT is a musical offering which ruptures into a theatrical venture, tentatively probing the line between love and hate, between tenderness, eroticism and aggression. As an extension of this world premiere, Douglas Gordon‘s installation THE END OF CIVILISATION is on view throughout the festival.