They keep you on the hook the whole way through, theyre your best friend and then you get a standardised Dear applicants email, she says. Wed been texting each other sparkle hearts all through the process.<\/p>\n
Reality TV is the contemporary Colosseum, she says. Its where we go to watch people suffer, with no level of social consequence.<\/p>\n
That show was at the Centre for Contemporary Photography in 2020, exploring the arduous audition process and exposing as much of it as she could legally get away with.<\/p>\n
A scene from Remains to be Seen.Credit:Georgia Banks \/ David Meagher<\/p>\n
After that, Banks was thinking about what drives people including herself to seek immortality on reality TV, on social media or, indeed, in art.<\/p>\n
And somebody said to me, I guess your funeral is the reality TV show, she says.<\/p>\n
Banks says her work has been about finding the edges of the possibility of the lived experience. To go hard, in other words.<\/p>\n
So she has created an elaborate framework where her own real-life funeral is the prize. Anyone can enter, through the website remainstobeseen.info, and will go through an audition process that parallels and parodies the TV versions: invasive, personal questions that would usually be about life and loves but will now be about death and dying.<\/p>\n
A scene from Remains to be Seen.Credit:Georgia Banks \/ David Meagher<\/p>\n
They include, for example, how they think they will feel when one of their exes dies.<\/p>\n
Applications are open from now and, says Banks, the winner will be announced on the day that I die, and they will get absolute, total, 100 per cent control over everything to do with the disposal of my body and my funeral.<\/p>\n
Loading<\/p>\n
Absolutely everything. The budget is Banks estate.<\/p>\n
I could be liquefied or cremated or turned into a diamond or shot into outer space, says Banks. They might only want to invite millionaires, or the directors of all the national [art] galleries.<\/p>\n
It will be up to them. Banks doesnt even want to know, and wont ask.<\/p>\n
But she gets something in return: the right to their answers to the application questions. And the funeral and its byproducts are a work of art that must carry Banks name.<\/p>\n
Loading<\/p>\n
Ive decided to take my own death and turn it into a way to never die, she says. The goal is immortality, right? Isnt that what we all want, to not be forgotten?<\/p>\n
And the all-important question, how will she pick the winner?<\/p>\n
Naturally, the same way reality TV does.<\/p>\n
Whoever I think will cause the most drama, she laughs. Whoevers not here to make friends.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
See more here: <\/p>\n
Dying for immortality, this artist wants you to dispose of her body - Sydney Morning Herald<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" They keep you on the hook the whole way through, theyre your best friend and then you get a standardised Dear applicants email, she says. Wed been texting each other sparkle hearts all through the process. Reality TV is the contemporary Colosseum, she says. Continue reading