Düsseldorf. Can images speak? »Talking Pictures« is an English term to describe sound films with synchronized sound. However, in the film and video works displayed in Düsseldorf at the K21 gallery’s »Talking Pictures« exhibition, the sounds can seldom be located so precisely. In the installation »No Depression in Heaven« (video, dummies, painting, wallpaper) by Mathilde ter Heijne, for example, the viewer has to walk back and forth to spot that the voices singing »oh Death, please spare me over …« and reverberating all around come not only from two loudspeakers hung on high but also stem from inside two dummies that produce an accompaniment. The Strasbourg-born artist modelled these life-size figures on herself, one in the guise of a poor housewife, the other turning her back to the viewer and clad in a respectable white lace dress. In parallel, a video shows slow-motion silent film reels of a duel in the form of a shoot-out. Whether accompanying this mechanism or the posed re-enactment – the elegiac protest song maintains its puzzling location set against the rigid antagonism of the depiction.
Meanwhile, discretion induced Gillian Wearing to offer us only an indistinct view of the figures speaking in her piece. For her video film »Trauma« eight people dared to make direct frontal confessions of painful experiences from their youth (such as secret murderous desires) into the camera – but this was subject to the caveat that when confessing they could hide behind masks, which did not reveal lips speaking but instead showed only a sad plastic mouth. However it is not only the smooth infantile forms of the masks that making the grave confessions anonymous. The practiced routine with which these are recounted – apparently because the individuals concerned have been grappling inwardly with these experiences for years and years – also undermines any spontaneous authenticity. The mode of screening, with viewers watching the video in an individual booth, almost as if they were in a confessional, also heightens the ambiguous mix of apprehension and rapt absorption.
That means it is hardly surprising if the curators, Doris Krystof and Barbara J. Scheuermann, conceived their exhibition in terms of the buzzword of »theatricality«. For all the diversity with which the works they have selected stage image and language, the pieces have little in common with the illusionist intentions of classical talkies. Instead they are media-related deconstructions of scenic action, which here, sometimes immediately adjacent to each other, sometimes screened off, demand individual and collective modes of perception. In the open exhibition space, if a viewer wants to concentrate on Catherine Sullivan’s silent 5-channel video projection, »Big Hunt«, in which dancers exaggerate the gestures of historical dance scenes (e.g. with Ingmar Bergman), he or she also has to come to terms with the »oh Death«, of the adjacent installation, mentioned above, which resounds at some distance. Undivided attention can be enjoyed at best by the screenings in closed black boxes, such as Danica Daki_ s »Role-Taking, Role-Making«, in which the artist from Sarajevo presents the Sinti and Roma theatre »Pralipe«. Whilst in this piece interviews, dance scenes and psychological theorems call traditional role models into question on the screen in the interior, film photos hanging on the outside of the black box (the psychologist as »gypsy« model, the theatre troupe in front of the plein-air view of a French painting of ruins) link up Daki_ s portrait essay with the neighbouring exhibits.
In this fashion, differentiated models of the formation of community arise, reflecting these types of isolating, contrasting or overlapping presentations, whether these involve the reconstruction of intimacy, a polyphonic composition or spatially determined shifts in distance. Correspondingly, our ways of looking at the phenomena of cultural identity, social demands or biographic eccentricity depicted here definitely do organise themselves into variable alliances, even in cases in which the mechanism selected functions in an almost classical cinematographic manner, such as in Markus Schinwald’s »Dictio Pii«. In this piece strange loners wander through the wan light of an old Viennese hotel (on the Getreidemarkt). In atmospheric wide-screen scenes, the protagonists constantly shake clouds of dust out of their clothes or set the corners of their mouths in a perpetual grin with small silver chains. Accompanying each of their distracted appearances, a voice off evokes the collective nature of these eccentrics, intoning, first with a male and then with a female voice: »We are the perfume of corridors ...«. Nevertheless the black box addresses the film to the viewers isolated by the darkened room. Keren Cytter, born in Tel Aviv, gives a much brighter twist to the staging of her burlesque »The Victim«. Disputes in a student clique take centre-stage here. An Israeli soldier returns from the war to a shared flat. He feels rejected and therefore commits suicide, yet his »sacrifice« is smoothly integrated into the plot, which is conceived as a loop, like a musical da capo, particularly as the dramatic dialogue is camouflaged as a rap chorus. Presented in the claustrophobic confinement of a bright box, Cytter’s video is one of the most striking pieces in the exhibition.
Translated by Helen Ferguson