Martin O'Brien
Performance Artist
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  • The Unwell
  • Zombie Time
The Unwell is a film made in 2016 in collaboration with Suhail Merchant. We decided to make this accessible online now as it seems to speak to the times we are living in. I'm currently trying to understand how to speak about this virus, which poses such a big threat to me personally, but which also means sickness is something everyone is having to face. So much of my work has often imagined an unwell world, or a city plagued by sickness. The Unwell was my first film project. It is a playful imagining of an apocalyptic landscape inhabited only by staggering, coughing bodies. I perform as all of the sixteen different zombies in the film, which was shot by Suhail. Human life has changed and only the unwell remain. The world in the film looks dystopic but I see it as a strange, tongue in cheek utopia. It offers a view of illness as the development of human kind. It is the clearest representation I have done of an apocalyptic world in which only the sick can survive. Keep Breathing everyone.