The King’s Burial Shoes makes use of multiple choice questions designed to test overseas students’ grammatical knowledge of English. These examples of ‘authentic discourse’ are removed from their language-course book context, written out on balloons and inserted back into the real world from which they have supposedly been collated.

The balloons are inserted into fissures and gaps throughout the building’s fabric and often require the viewer to stand on furniture or use viewing aids (provided) to read them.

As the extracts are too short to provide any real sense of the original discourse from which the course book has lifted them, the task of placing them culturally and socially is left to the viewer. The series takes its name from the subject area of one of the multiple-choice questions.