James Sibley
Kicking a Dead Horse
2021

‘Kicking a Dead Horse’ (2021) combines footage from forgotten family holidays, 3D animation software and sonic narration to explore the underpinning signifiers of Western reality and their origins in Hollywoodized fiction, simultaneously unearthing and destabilizing the questions surrounding class and labour that are bound to this way of life.

James Sibley lives and works in London. His practice mines fragments of personal nostalgia and cultural recurrences to poke fun at today’s loss of historicity. By mapping fissures between the American dream and its distillation of European folklore, the authenticity inscribed within environments, stories and readymades are called into question. These ideas present themselves via multimedia installation, psychogeographic drifts, writing, video and most recently through sonic investigation. Sibley has exhibited internationally at Le Grand Café, St-Nazaire Centre d’art contemporain, France (2016) and at HFBK School of Fine Art, Hamburg (2018), and is part of Bloomberg’s New Contemporaries 2021.