Unnoticed under a heap of clothes, a teddy bear lies on the floor of a closed wardrobe. In front of him, in that very wardrobe, two teenage girls stand facing each other, bashfully chewing their fingernails and nervously scuttling from one foot to the other. It is only as a muffled babble of voices that the party going on outside comes through to their unusual venue where both of them try to hide their hesitant interest in their counterpart.

For seven minutes they stand avoiding each other’s gaze, seven minutes that, according to the rules of the game, are supposed to be seven minutes in heaven…

"Actually, it’s really an awful game", Alex McQuilkin explains the popular party entertainment that involves two persons being locked inside a tight room and left to do whatever they please for the duration of the indicated time. However, the intimacy that is supposed to be effected in that forced situation does not arise in Alex McQuilkin’s video “Seven minutes in heaven” (2004), instead revealing the inner conflict of the girls who, trapped under the pressure of living up to the expectations of a wild exchange of body fluids, sink into wavering inactivity.

The conflicts and pipe dreams in teenage girls’ everyday life are the great theme around which the works of the young video artists Alex McQuilkin (*1980, Boston) centre. Through her protagonists, she tells intimate stories about the search for identity and the desire to be someone special – stories which offer the viewers immediate identification points but still leave them standing slightly embarrassed in front of the monitor.

from: Von Himmel und Hölle und dem ganz normalen Wahnsinn by Katharina Klara Jung, 2006.