I first heard about Johan Grimonprez in a contemporary art course I took a few years ago, in the context of his 1997 piece Dial History - an ominous pre-emption to 9/11. The notion of appropriated imagery was new to me at this time, having yet to really get my head around any postmodernist literature on the matter. Two years on, I am a great fan of Grimonprez’s extensive archive and am just about to start work at the gallery for one of his rather rare solo shows. The intriguing set up for this show is that while much of his work is about re-visiting and re-inventing old material, through a solo show he has the possibility to re-visit and re-invent his own previous re-inventions. Dial History is played off against another more recent work, Double Take re-enforcing the common themes of reality, masquerade and serendipity, or ‘happy accidents’ consistently nodded to in these films. Grimonprez’s true uniqueness lies in his ability to take a well known film or media snippet and re-position it back into the unknown, more often than not, by referencing the media’s ability to shape reality. He discussed at length today, what he called, ‘the zap generation’ - since the eighties we have had the remote control and our ability and, indeed, our taste for zipping and zapping from one thing to the next is expanding at an alarming rate. The zap generation has increased the gap between reality and a media masquerade of reality. Or as he said, ‘reality is suffering from misrepresentation.’ This is subtly reflected in the design of the show. As you move from Dial History to Double Take a quote on the wall walks you through the multi-layered significance of birds, flight, the threat from the sky (he returns to Hitchcock imagery and metaphors time and again) as a metaphor for mediation itself - TV, the threat from the sky. Yet many events can be signified and linked through one clever signifier.