Work
Escalator Seek Assistance Strange Behaviour Pollen Medusa In the Room
The Romance From Rhetoric to Substance Veneer and Other Sentiments
A Cure for Solitude Untitled Recollection *Still in Motion Current
Still in Motion
Curated by Vishal Shah, Leonard Street Gallery - London, 2006
In this single screen installation showing video works by four artists, curated by Vishal Shah we are witness
to a whole series of structural condensations which enable the works to resonate together. Formally each of the
video works revolve around different ways of utilising stillness in relationship to movement, the still image, the
stationary frame, or a still place. There is also the use of near monochrome in each of the works which lend a
mood of furtive withdrawal on the level of vision. This is a mood of something elsewhere, another time, even
a spectral sense of displacement. Indeed I would like to claim that there is some unitary sense of aesthetic
discourse which congregates around this thematic of displacement and that this constitutes a mode of apparitional modernity, a kind of re-enactment of modernity's gestural surface but without the indexes which would secure it
as modernity. This relates to the notion that our passage of time in some ways throws us out of time, displaces, or
serve to haunt our sense of presence and leaves us to reiterate the past as if a surplus is contained there but in this
double movement of passage and reiteration we return again to find the principle of reality vacated or in ruin.
Instead we are left outside of ourselves, in a sense of an elsewhere that we have little by way of claim, but in this
indistinct place we are still looked at as if exiled.
In the work 'Immergence' by Ailbhe Ni Bhriain we are viewing a still and somewhat desolate landscape image
that make awaken within us a feeling of remoteness or ever receding distance. This is a site of emptying or
estrangement and it is also a landscape that borders on time itself, perhaps even a threshold of vision as well.
Within this stationary image, plums of an ink like solution is injected into the field of vision; slow in motion,
hypnotic and strange. The frame becomes a meditation that might also coalesce as the potentiality of a darkening
of vision as opposed to release, but we are held by this duality of visual pleasure and tactile trepidation. We are in
fact been two registers of vision, one static and one moving, one empty and one full, perhaps two empires of vision
also, one Western, fixed and coherent, the other Eastern, floating and empty and with this mixing orders of
sublimity, beauty, toxicity contending the frame.
Renata Kudlacek's work 'I wonder if you wonder' is simply composed out of a still image of a face projected
upon a moving female body. What at first appears to be a sophisticated form of animation is in fact an analogical
image in real time intersected by the sound of whispering, faint laughter, distant conversations and mechanical
sounds. Visual the work of an hypnotic rhythm, as if it is capable of drawing you deep into its order and yet
something is also being cast, like a metaphorical shadow as if indeed it is a shadow dance. Does this work issue out
of a sense of splitting or is it composed out of a desire for union? We are perhaps left to think about how the
boundaries of internalisation and externalisation are at play within the construction of an imaginary order. This is
a doubly melancholic feeling to this work for it seems to be both about a relationship to a lost object, forever
performed within a circuit of projection but also the lost object of modernity that might have promised
identification as opposed a passage of time without indexical assurance (progress, completion). This is the work
of a sky dancer who has no country or center to dance within.
The work 'State' by Kirk Palmer was shot with a single roll of super-eight film. It an image of a perspectivally
receding architectural place with a grand, official façade of building centred against a darkening sky. Birds appear
to invade and cut across this space, disrupting the relationship of near and far, so that order and chaos are in
constant contention. We cannot be sure what time we are in, an imaginary time of grand, Imperial Europe, a staged fabrication or a vestige of another time. The unsettling of time and place precedes layer after layer but meanwhile
little happens but the criss-crossing flight of birds across the visual field. We might feel that the birds are ciphers
for a distracted vision or even for the state of abjection but whatever we again left without either calling or center.
The video 'Seek Assistance' by Vishal Shah takes us to the starting point of a tube journey when our valid
ticket is rejected. The system thus refuses to allow our passage. This is a work composed out of sharp and exact
editing, distinct configurations of abstract light, form and image within the suggestion of a narrative collision.
There is a fast and disjunctive economy at work within audio and vision pulse across the face of the other (both a
literal face and the face of projected light). Visually there are strong hints of early modernist cinema and
photography, Man Ray, Rodchenko and Moholy Nagy appear as references meeting visual forms that derives from
a fast world of commercial video. We are left in a state of an in-between of passage, combined with interruption
and detour. This is the place that a subject might either be composed or undone.
This is a timely showing of restless work that do not describe themselves easily within the contemporary framework.
The works are imbued with a dark but resistant energy that disturbs over easy conceptualisation. They suggest a
Europe that has lost its own contours, adrift from the circulation of memories that once secured continuity.
This is not nostalgic work, but rather it is touched by a suggestion of melancholia, a suggestion that is already
constituted in our displacement of time and 'unimaginable elsewhere'.
Review by Jonathan Miles - 15.08.2006