Gallery One Belfast based artist, Peter Richards uses the pinhole camera as a tool to explore the live art event and its relationship to photographic documentation. He brings together performance art and its documentation as a single entity, referring to his practise as ‘performance/documentation’ in a way that seems directly at odds with our perception of performance art as only a time-based medium. The exhibition features a performance where Richards invites his audience to dress up and become their favourite artist. You, the audience, can either be part of the group performance, using a prop box and other stimuli, or watch the event projected live on a screen made of photographic paper as it develops in the light-tight Camera Obscura or pinhole camera. Once processed, the photographic paper is re-installed on the gallery walls. The exhibition plays with the relationship between the photograph and the performance. By locating his audience within the camera, Richards is attempting to dissolve the boundary between the documentary photograph and the performance. One of three new exhibitions by visual artists using performance and live art to revisit moments in history, 2 Oct – 14 Nov 04. Picture credit: Lights, Camera, and a Little Action, 1998 (detail)