Stories

1982
Country: UK
Duration: 13 mins
|17 Seconds
Colour,
Sound: Sound
Available Format/s: DVD / Digibeta tape / SD Digital file

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In Stories, Adams fuses storytelling and performance in a reverie on reality and fiction. The artist sits alone in near darkness while, in voiceover, he relates a series of seemingly autobiographical anecdotes – “inside information” marked by irony, loss and black humour . The stark interrogation of self is accompanied by evocative narrative signifiers: a ringing telephone (an Adams signature), a ticking clock, a naked light bulb, dice, flickering TV images of a porn movie. The ambiguity of his stories – memory? dreams? fictions? – implies a tension between the construction of personal reality and the internalisation of the conventions of popular fiction. As Adams writes “The stories are all true. The character, of course, is fiction.”

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