Alma Enterprises gallery is excited to present the UK premiere of 'We Make Our Own Television', a video installation bringing together the work of two award-winning experimental film-makers. Featuring 'Because of the War' by Jennet Thomas and 'The Badger series' by Paul Tarragó, the installation is the first gallery collaboration between the two.

The artists connect conceptually through a shared vision of a world mediated by television, where the reassuring voices of authority and reason come from a glowing box in the living room. The works imaginatively re-engineer the generic structures and narratives of the medium, re-wiring the familiar registers of sense-making. Both adopt the cosy familiarity of the medium's authority voices to wonderfully humorous and absurd ends.

In the projected single-channel video 'Because of the War', a dapper Yellow Man Lecturer looks the viewer squarely in the eye. He expertly delivers an account of how it all came to pass: the conflict, the changes, everyday acts of transubstantiation, leading to a world where magick and ritual are suburban norms. Part slide-show with narrative interludes, this free verse instructional account, leads the viewer to another place. It is a world governed by Neo-Absurd un-sense, skewed 'facts' and strange folklore but a world with which we feel an anxious familiarity.

'The Badger series' consists of four episodes of a simulated children's television programme. Like 'Sooty and Sweep' gone awry, Tarragó recasts the morally instructive puppet show format with a hard-edged contemporary sensibility. An experimental filmmaker taking on the guise of children's entertainer, Tarragó becomes the 'kindly mentor' figure in a household of capersome woodland animals. Alternating moral guidance on the 'modern' themes of sanity, depression and altered states of consciousness, transgressive art practices with the slapstick fun of entertainment routines, the episodes attempt and yet resist resolution.

Jennet Thomas and Paul Tarragó will be discussing their work on Saturday 2nd December at 6.30pm

'Because of the War' continues Jennet's developments in expanded narrative work seen in On the Shape of the Scab (2004: Courthouse Gallery, Anthology Film Archives, New York) and Double Dummy (2005: MOMA NY, ICA London, European Media Arts Festival Tour) and the multi award winning Sharony! and Perfect Spot. 'The Badger series' develops Paul Tarragó's performative meta-narratives seen in such recent pieces as Making things meaningful (2003: Kunstfilmbiennale Koln, ICA London, NYUFF) and Resident of Earth (2005: Rotterdam International Film Festival, ICA London, Commonwealth Film Festival) Paul's work also includes the prize-winning films Moving Back from the Beyond and Why the Canary Sings No More.

For more info about the project : www.wemakeourowntv.com

For further information contact Sara Watkins at sara@thisisland.net or 07973 272543

Press images can be accessed from here