Last night British artist Tris Vonna-Michell delivered a dizzying fifteen minute performance in the Contemporary’s Front Room. Some of our guests were still seated in our new lobby cum living room, engrossed in conversation with Jonathan Harvey and Esam Pasha, two guest experts on the road with Conversations About Iraq. Meanwhile, the rest of the crowd crammed in to The Front Room gallery to catch Tris. Clutching a stack of 
500 A4 photocopies, blank side out, he began to fire off an improvised narrative, dropping single sheets on the ground as if turning pages in a book. The result was a kind of vertiginous autobiography, told through stream-of-consciousness fragments, anecdotes, mappings, and repeat descriptions. Moving from Japan to Berlin, Tris pulled us through an abstracted landscape and personal history, which ended, very simply, with a conclusion that the story, however labrynthian and interconnected, could never be complete.
In the space now sits those strewn papers on the floor, illuminated at intervals with the projection of clicking white slides. On the wall sits a pair of headphones from which, standing among the fragmented photocopies, one can listen to a recording of last night’s story.
prestigious award for young artists in the UK), is embarking on a road trip across the country this week with two guests experts, in order to encourage an unmediated, unscripted, and nonpartisan public discussion about Iraq, its present circumstances, and our relationship to its people and as a nation.