Ben Judd

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Ben Judd (born 1970) is a British artist, and lives and works in London. Judd is best known for his undercover videos of specific groups of people, such as trainspotters and Morris dancers, to which he added a voice-over describing an imagined connection or intimacy with the subjects.

Delusion is key to Ben Judd’s work - that an experience could be evidently constructed but somehow the observer, and in turn the viewer of the work, buys into the experience. The groups of people that he videos (tourists, trainspotters, amateur photographers, Morris dancers, preachers, witches) are part of a group and also detached from a larger group. Similarly, his activity mirrors theirs – he is also on the periphery of their group, and is both a voyeur and participant. Judd’s position is simultaneously close and distant, or connected and disconnected.

Judd’s photographs display a similar interest in the relationship between the constructed and the natural. His 3D photographs encapsulate a dichotomy; the viewer is simultaneously aware of their construction yet is also deluded that the experience is real.

Ben Judd completed a residency in Colombia in 2007, in which he was videoed having sessions with a witch, a parapsychologist, a scientologist, and a woman who had formed her own one-person religion. He also created his own movement, I Will Heal You, for which he invited local practitioners, such as an architect and furniture maker, to produce items. In May 2007, Judd was interviewed by Miser & Now [1] magazine on the work he produced there:

In previous work my intervention has largely been enacted through a series of voice-overs that provoke an almost imagined level of intervention in terms of what is being seen. With this work I wanted to put myself directly into the work and to join these belief systems. I wanted to add dimension and I really enjoyed it. I think that I built up the idea of the movement so much, and had so many collaborators on board, that a performative outcome became inevitable. There was an amazing sense of build up prior to the opening night. More and more things were being made, the space was being transformed, and at that stage I knew that if I wanted this thing to be believable then the ultimate conclusion was wearing the outfits and becoming the work. The project culminated in inviting people to visit the movement. This became an effective way to express the contradiction and dual function that I wanted within the work. People were invited to join the movement but also warned that it was a sham and that they should stay away. The manifesto for the movement was contradictory throughout. It was read in English and Spanish, so everything fed into this idea of a duality. It created a rhythm that in some way echoed the techniques of repetition adopted by many of the individuals and groups that I had been involved with.