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Straylight- Territories
Haluk Akakce(Turkey), Desperate Optimists(Ireland), Külli K. Kaats(Estonia), Paul Rowley(Ireland) + David Philips, Eyal Sivan(Israel) and Michel Khleifi(Palestine).
Straylight- Territories brings together the work of a diverse range of international artists whose concerns are both divergent and specific. Notions of space be it psychological, socio-political, geographical or abstract are explored variously by the artists and filmmakers respectively.
Haluk Akakce's abstract video works explore minimalist territories that appear to expand beyond the boundaries of the screen. Temporarily they are loops with no particular start or end, offering transitions from one scene to the next without emphasis being placed on the order of the scenes. In Black on White White on Black these minimalist spaces give way to organic forms that appear to be seedpods that float weightlessly in space suggesting ideas of growth and cultivation of these abstracted territories. A tension exists between the seemingly mathematical almost clinical spaces and the transition to organic form that too has been created digitally with logarithmic precision. The work unfolds at a meditative pace creating a temporal territory for the viewer to slowly absorb its forms.
The Desperate Optimists' 3 channel video Wire Crossing is a chronicle of a city over the course of one day. Filmed in real time
over 24 hours Christine Molloy and Joe Lawlor (desperate optimists) are
joined by a diverse range of invited local Singaporean artists to cover
the terrain. We follow 24 narratives (each one hour in duration) the sum total of which offer a unique portrait of a city. There is a fine
tradition in avant-garde and experimental film-making of turning the
camera upon the city. Man With A Movie Camera (1929), Berlin - Symphony Of A City (1927). It's as if film-makers at that early stage in cinema
history saw that this new technology was the ultimate tool for capturing the rhythms, textures and intensities of modern, industrial life in an urban environment. Wire Crossing offers a contemporary take on recording the kinetics and diversity of space and action in a city.
Külli K. Kaats installation Avifauna explores call and response in a new language of sounds and noises that have been gleaned from careful observation of the communicative enunciations of the bird kingdom. She has composed a symphony of refrains, in a scene set at night, that play through phases in a multi-channel video installation. The refrains sing to an oversized observing eye that peers back at source of the calls. The voices pierce the night as her head emerges from the gloom calling out with chirps, hoots and whistles, as if asking the overseeing eye to whom does this territory belong. Kaats creates an animist language that questions the delimiting boundaries of human communication in relation to the language of our distant cousins the birds. The birdsong can be read as a metaphor for encounters with any culture that is new, alien or different, Avifauna suggests the lengths of transference and deferral required in order to come to understanding with that which is other. In trying to understand the language of the birds Kaats must become almost birdlike.
Paul Rowley and David Philips' Security Fugue is a two channel video installation with audio. Contrasting the promise of rescue with threats of captivity and injury, Security Fugue examines personal responses to crisis in the current arena of ubiquitous security. Images of a rescue helicopter move across the screen in exaggerated slow motion, while on a second screen, the camera tracks over aeriel views of a hospital and rescue crew on the ground below. In the audio track, stuttering confessions and dislocated murmurs echo in unison with the constant rhythm of chopping helicopter blades which fills the space.
Musically, the imitative polyphonic compositional structure of the fugue in which a theme is stated successively in several voices is used both to determine the editing structure of the work and for its references to pursuit and flight. In psychiatry, the fugue is described as a condition of pathological amnesia during which one is apparently conscious of one's actions, but has no recollection of them after returning to a normal state. This condition, usually resulting from
severe mental stress, is of interest in describing a trauma that is experienced both individually and collectively.
Eyal Sivan and Michel Khleifi's documentary film Route 181, Fragments D'un Voyage en Palestine-Israel charts the filmmakers' journey along the 1947 UN demarcation line for the partition plan for Palestine. They filmed the people and places they encountered as they traveled along this virtual border. Without making any judgments they inserted themselves into the lived experience of daily life as it takes place within these contested territories. The film documents incidents that take place, events that are unfolding or stories that are told by the people who populate this land. This journey was edited down to a 7 hour duration making Route 181 an epic documentary in a temporal sense.
"We filmed in such a way as to see things, men women, and places as a sum total not yet revealed. Carried along by chance meetings, together we listened to words, nature, passions and disillusions. We tried to induce - first in ourselves, then in the subjects we filmed - a loving relationship with the everyday, one full of danger and encounter with death. Men and women were provided with the opportunity to speak - those who have forgotten the official discourse, but who are nonetheless the basis of the two societies, those on whose behalf the war is waged."
Mark Cullen 04
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