




Gorilla Tapes &
Scratch video emerged as a British artistic movement in the early to mid-1980s at the intersection of moving-image appropriation, left-wing activism, and the subcultures of post-punk and club scenes. It engaged critically with the pervasive influence of mass media, particularly broadcast television, through the use of found footage, rapid image sampling, and manipulations, while also targeting the established forms of video art that were then exhibited in museums and galleries.
One prominent group of this brief yet influential movement was Gorilla Tapes (Jon Dovey, Gavin Hodge, Jean McClements, and Tim Morrison), active in the mid-1980s. Till Death To Apartheid offers a glimpse into their prolific work, which was defined by sharp political satire, humor, and the critique of dominant ideologies. The collective interweaved historical film footage alongside TV news imagery from the Thatcher era, sampling, remixing and re-contextualizing this material to expose the underlying power structures behind mass media communication. Gorilla Tapes’ practice foreruns today’s Internet culture, where appropriation and remixing are default creative strategies in an age flooded with hyper-networked, overexposed imagery.
Drawing from the cut-up and remix techniques of London’s Caribbean enclaves, from the turntable scratching of New York hip hop, and from earlier collage experiments of Brion Gysin and William Burroughs in the 1960s, Gorilla Tapes distorted raw television footage, feeding it back into an endless loop of reuse and critique. Their work interrogates how we consume and even ›metabolize‹ moving images—an effort to »talk back to television«, subverting its messages and inviting audiences to rethink critically their relationship with mass media. (Vanina Saracino)
Commissioned by the BBC