Olivia Plender

The title of Olivia Plender's installation, 'AADIEU ADIEU APA (Goodbye Goodbye Father)', seems to refer to a node of meaning that has been mangled just enough to evade identification. Similarly, the vein of absurd untruth running throughout the installation - which comprises video, posters, an architectural model and other evidence-like sundries - is clearly rooted in 'real' histories transformed into acerbic and elusive conjecture.

Plender's source material ranges from the grand narrative of the rampant British Empire to recent news events, such as the whale that died in the Thames in 2006. In the video 'What is England', a Prince of Tourists delivers a lecture that centres on the British Empire Exhibition held at Wembley Park in 1924. Coupled with images of the market held there now, with its stalls of tat covered with striped plastic awnings, the commentary on towering national achievements and the political role of pageantry assumes cadences of consumerist critique, drawing parallels between empire and contemporary globalist power structures.

Like Les Dawson's legendary bad piano playing, it takes a certain amount of knowledge and virtuosity to be constructively silly with history; and with such embellishments as a Palestinian pavilion and a life-size rendition of the Prince of Wales modelled in butter, Plender swings between base and grave satire to raise serious issues with a light touch. But a somewhat contingent style of making curtails what might otherwise be devastating lampoon. The lo-fi studio-bound video, the digitally printed posters and a gappy hang feels more like a collation of interesting propositions than a rounded metafiction of sound architecture and controlled impact.