Till Death Us Do Part, 1986

TE: At the birth of VHS tapes, very few artists were committing to using video as a tool for art. It was new, unexplored and simply did not have the same flexibility or aesthetic properties as painting, film or photography, but it had a connection with the medium of television and an immediacy that I wished to explore as an ongoing project. I wanted to see how a practice of video making had a relationship with other forms of expression, so the idea of a marriage vow, both as a statement of my commitment and the more conceptual idea of looking at the medium through its relational with other forms of expression made that title seem appropriate. I remember at the time feeling that somehow the medium of video itself would be the death of a certain way of making and understanding art. The project was to look for links and ties between the use of video as a form of expression with other forms such as cinema and theater. It was only when these ties were broken that the poetics of what the medium could do would be expressed. extract from Till Death Us Do Part interview with Ugochukwu-Smooth Nzewi