"IT was my destiny to become a visual artist", Sarbjit Samra announced as he took the Project stage last night, dressed in a multicoloured sari and cowboy hat, holding aloft an Oscar statuette. Though this was one of the few occasions the artist spoke during Death Drive, his cycle of four short performance pieces, a similar flavour of camp, mercurial bombast dominated the evening.
It seems that, by willing the audience to take seriously his brashly psychoanalytical style, while at the same time taunting the true believers with burlesque mugging, melodramatic music and corny costumes, Samra hopes to reenact the multiple collisions between popular expectations and more complex realities.
In the second section, I Feel A Song Coming On, Samra reclines in drag on a chaise longue at the edge of the screen, between the audience and the climactic scenes of an action movie, apparently revelling in the giddily complex, yet unconscious symbolism of the clip. Next comes Big Game Hunting, in which Samra creates echoes of Beckett as he sits in a rocking chair listening to orchestral film music.