Product Recall

2007 - Film & Video (Film & Video)

4 min 27

Carey Young

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“Product Recall” is a video perfomative pun on the action recalling memories in the form of a psychoanalytic session and the recall of faulty products from multinational corporations. Young enters a practicing psychoanalyst room and begins a session. Dressed in corporate business attire, Young encompasses both the corporation and individual. The psychoanalyst opens the discussion by asking her how she feels. The exchange turns into a game of questions and answers whence the psychoanalysis asks Young to guess the corporations of the slogans that he recites, which many refer to sport corporation branding of “inspiration” and “imagination”. In Young’s failure to recall many brands, the audience is urged to question whether the psychoanalysis’s task is for Young to recall or forget the slogans. Through demonstrating that while branding is forgettable, the artist nonetheless highlights the omnipresence and power of multinationals in the landscape of our society. In the style of a documentary, this fictitious video performance is an unscripted play on subconscious memory and conscious intellectual emancipation. Young’s “Product Recall” is a shrewd and challenging analysis of collective and individual memory in the face of corporate oppression. Actor: Morgan Deare Camera: Peter Emery Sound: Dave Hunt

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Carey Young’s (b. Lusaka, Zambia, 1970) practice centers on the ethics of business and legal practice, motivated from having spent her early professional career in this context, to question society and politics. Young parodies and analyses the corporate business and legal world to expose its influence on contemporary society. The subject of law —that which is central to the structure of the international community — is a subject rarely explored in the contemporary art milieu. In exploring law as an artistic medium to address questions of the sublime and the void, Young traverses themes of the autonomous body, law and fiction and the power of law on society to highlight the danger of corporate influence in the institute and autonomous thinking.

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Colors:

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• corporation.n.01
• multinational.s.01
• ad.n.01
• subconscious_mind.n.01
• power.n.01
• capitalism.n.01
• zambian
• british contemporary artists
• institutional critique