My Funeral Song – a five-screen video installation was presented in Gallery 2 alongside an earlier series of films Little Songs To Cry To (2003) in the Reading Room
Each screen in My Funeral Song focused on one of Beban’s close friends as they listen to the song they would like to have played at their funeral. The simplicity of each portrait heightens attention to subtle gestures and shifts in expression that chart an inner journey, through psychological states of remembering the past and envisioning a future in their absence.
Continuing her interest in use of sound as a narrative device, the project centres on the power of a well-loved song to compress an outlook on life into a telling moment that is at once emotional and thoughtful, melancholic and full of joy. Little Songs To Cry To were filmed spontaneously as ‘home-movies’. These devoted observations of the people closest to Beban are tributes set against the backdrop of a specific soundtrack. Breda Beban was born in Serbia, raised in Macedonia and Croatia and is now based in London. Her work often invokes human experiences of relationships, observing how these are played out in the performance of life.
