Governmentality and the illusions of emancipation in Jenny Brown's Many Happy Returns
by Sacha Kagan
We all live in a little Village… Your village may be different from other people’s villages but we are all prisoners. (Patrick Mc Goohan)
Since March 17th 2013 (and until the end of April), the gallery Semmer Berlin hosted Jenny Brown’s Many Happy Returns, a show revolving around the cult television series The Prisoner from the late 1960s. The prisoner in that TV series is a British former secret agent (played by Patrick Mc Goohan), held in an isolated mysterious coastal village resort where his captors try to find out why he abruptly resigned from his job. The village is a surrealistically set-up environment, a jail without walls but replete with CCTVs and anti-evasion technologies. The village is also a factitious community where personal names are replaced by numbers (the prisoner is referred to only as “number 6”) and where social interactions are performed and manipulated in a variety of ways.
Since March 17th 2013 (and until the end of April), the gallery Semmer Berlin hosted Jenny Brown’s Many Happy Returns, a show revolving around the cult television series The Prisoner from the late 1960s. The prisoner in that TV series is a British former secret agent (played by Patrick Mc Goohan), held in an isolated mysterious coastal village resort where his captors try to find out why he abruptly resigned from his job. The village is a surrealistically set-up environment, a jail without walls but replete with CCTVs and anti-evasion technologies. The village is also a factitious community where personal names are replaced by numbers (the prisoner is referred to only as “number 6”) and where social interactions are performed and manipulated in a variety of ways.
