They Don’t like Our Jokes Because They Are So Stupid

Squid & Tabernacle (UK) and 1646 (NL) are pleased to present They Don’t like Our Jokes Because They Are So Stupid, a programme of international video art selected by Camilla Robinson, director of Dapper Films.

They Don’t like Our Jokes Because They Are So Stupid is a programme of 7 works chosen by filmmaker Camilla Robinson from the Vast Forward collection of video art hosted by 1646. The selection explores the use of humour in contemporary video art in a series of pieces by Indiana Audunsdottir (ISL), Jacqueline Forzelius (SWE), Milutin Gubash (SRB), Jonas Nilsson (SWE), Erkka Nissinen (FIN), Clara Palli Monguilod (ESP) and Nina Yuen (USA).

A series of Martian images of life on earth.  Multiple eruptions of the strange, the grotesque, the perplexing and the delightfully peculiar.  We see the foreign in the familiar and the familiar in the foreign and their sudden and surprising conjunction makes us laugh out loud.*

Laugh, snigger, or choke; produced in completely different times and locales, the presented works all use humour to frame and introduce personal stories or universal ideas, from the ordinary yet strange, to the overtly grotesque, and critical views on ‘the other’. Shared obsessions and anxieties are explored in a format which also inevitably examines self image and production value. And they are amusing. In great humour, the joke is always on us *

They Don’t Like Our Jokes Because They Are So Stupid was previewed at Crunch The Art and Music Festival in Hay, 19-21st November 2010.

Squid & Tabernacle is an itinerant gallery. For details of our current programme and upcoming events, please click here.

1646 is a project space for contemporary art in The Hague, The Netherlands.  For details of our current programme and upcoming events, please click here.

(*excerpts ” Laughing at Foreigners: A Peculiar Defence of Ethnic Humour” by Simon Critchley.)