In Your Face: SHOW studio

Contemporary artists Harold Offeh and Eloise Calandre collaborated to explore concepts of portraiture and its capacity to challenge and provoke in a series of three one-off performances collectively titled In Your Face: I See Myself, broadcast live throughout 3 February 2012.

The first performance plays with the concept of this gesture of friendship and approval and transforming it to a painful endurance test. The second film builds on the provocative theme of the latter, exploring the potentials and possibilities of facial expression and using Calandre's own face as a screen for a re-projection of her features. The third broadcast is an expansion of Offeh's existing series, Covers, where the artist uses himself as the key figure in a recreation of the cover of The Rolling Stones' Exile On Main Street. The artist appears as '3Ball Charlie', a thirties freak show performer.

By using the primary mediums of popular culture - photography and video - Offeh and Calandre's performances explore portraiture in a new way, unravelling complex ideas of race, identity and desire.