The Opium Den

The city is a landscape for imagination; it is a character, a living being. Oben and Roberts are interested in uncovering the dark and mysterious spaces of the city and the people who once inhabited them. Through installation, performance and photography they explore, navigate and record a mythical landscape of urban dreams and nightmares, searching the dark corridors and long locked rooms of forgotten and neglected areas. By picking out the patterns of the place they look to uncover dormant narratives tuning into the historical, geographical and psychological reverberations of the space.

Through installation, performance and photography Tiff Oben & Helene Roberts collaborate to intimate females specific to semi-derelict urban sites. Their characters stem from the stereotypes and archetypes we associate with the historical spaces chosen, but the artists then unhinge assumptions through the suggestion of small subversions.

Inspired by Cardiff's mythology of Chinese Laundry-based opium dens and the mystery of Johnny Hop, found dead in the company of three unconscious sisters of Welsh decent in a sealed room, filled with opium smoke. Oben and Roberts built their own poetic version of the opiated den of iniquity at tactileBOSCH gallery, itself a two-hundred year old former laundry. The installation then became a performance space in which they directed performance artists Caroline Biggs and Iwan Ap Huw Morgan in order to create a series of haunting photographs.