Exhibition: Art that uses grains of rice to bring statistics to life

ArtHouse Jersey is delighted to announce ‘Of all the people in all the world’: Jersey, a performance installation that uses grains of rice to bring what can be abstract statistics to life in a brilliantly visual fashion. The show will explore both international and local statistics, on the floor of the St Helier exhibition space.

One grain equals one person. A beautifully simple equation for a beautifully simple performance installation by the internationally acclaimed UK based theatre company Stan’s Cafe. Over the course of 17 days, a team of performers carefully weigh out quantities of rice to represent a host of human statistics, such as:

• the populations of towns and cities
• the number of doctors, the number of soldiers
• the number of people born each day, the number who die
• all the people who have walked on the moon
• deaths in the holocaust

The statistics are arranged in labelled piles creating an ever-changing landscape of rice. The statistics and their juxtapositions can be moving, shocking, celebratory, witty and thought provoking.

Internationally acclaimed Stan’s Cafe is a theatre company based in Birmingham formed in 1991. It makes installation and performance projects across diverse media which have toured the world. ‘Of all the people in all the world’ is their longest running artwork (first staged in 2003) and now finally arrives to Jersey.

Head of Programme for ArtHouse Jersey, James Tyson, said: “This is a wonderful and fascinating show that makes you see the world in a startlingly different way – from the trivial to the monumental, the tragic to the hopeful, ‘Of all the people in all the world’ reminds us both of the fragility and precariousness of the world we live in, as well as those humble truths that connect us all as humans. As it invites audiences to bring their own facts and figures, I’m intrigued both by what Stan’s Cafe will reveal to us as well as how our audiences inform the ever-changing experience of the exhibition”.

“You learn more in five minutes in this show than reading the whole of the New York Times” – Lou Reed.