An Empire is a multi-year research project by artists Richard Hancock and Litsa Kiousi.

Drawing on their very different and complex relationships to European identity -- Hancock as a UK national, and Kiousi as a Greek citizen, both residing for well over a decade in Germany -- the artists endeavour to explore the histories, atrocities, presents and futures of empire building. Together they ask how these practices may be identified, articulated, subverted and resisted.

Throughout An Empire, the artists map the tide of European history, propose questions around their place in the contemporary world, and exchange experimental scores for a future. Through a collaborative dialogue that continually exchanges the poetic and the concrete, the artists create a world where the complexity of contemporary existence in a modern empire resonates.

Investigating the notion of the ‘papers of the empire’, as the material through which empires have commonly attained, consolidated, and perpetuated their powers and legacies, Hancock and Kiousi have developed a ‘performance- in-print’ in seven acts; a boxed edition of photographs, texts, and material traces of their artistic processes. The event of the performance moves away from the communal viewing of bodies on stage, to an individuated encounter between an audience and the boxed edition, which requires the viewer to perform multiple gestures of unwrapping, unfolding, and unravelling in order to unpack the colonial histories contained within.

The seven acts of An Empire unfold over a series of 22 photographic scenes, and a text — written in Ojibwe — by the artist Isaiah Lopaz. While the ordering of the scenes suggest a clear path from coercion to chaos, the plates remain unbound and open to reinterpretation and reconfiguration by the viewer. Each scene holds a moment of knowledge, longing, and desire that may be pulled from the ashes of history as a meditation on loss, damage and deception.