Vienna. The »Factory« space on the lowest floor of Mumok, which is dedicated to young artistic positions, is not a straightforward space for all forms of art to engage with; however, over and over again it transpires that the space seems to really be made for film installations. In contrast with Harun Farocki, who also introduced a spatial division into his »Bild/Gegenbild« (»Image/Counter-image«) confrontations in the »Factory«, Runa Islam’s three films are each projected onto a single screen in spatial configurations akin to those found in film theatres. The artist, nominated for the 2008 Turner Prize, examines the devices, apparatuses and recording procedures of film as a medium, referring repeatedly to its avant-garde tradition, focussing in her approach not on complicated projection methods but instead on the production process and on the pictorial level per se. A scene from »Martha« by Rainer Werner Fassbinder was the starting point for »Tuin« (1998), one of her earliest films, and in Mumok she is showing a brand new piece, referencing French director Robert Bresson in its title: »Empty the Pond to get the Fish« as he advised readers of his »Notes on Cinematography« (1950–1958), which is divided up into chapters such as »Gestures and Words«, »On True and False« or indeed »On Fragmentation«. The latter stems from the instruction for action cited in the title, which in Bresson’s texts comes immediately after the assertion »One does not create by adding, but by taking away«.
In her 35mm film »Empty the Pond to get the Fish«, a co-production with Mumok, she imbues Bresson’s instructions with an ironic twist by focussing on the Museum of the 20th Century’s move out of the 20s House, named after the museum, as a device to bring about fragmentation.
From 1962 to 2001 the museum now known as Mumok organised shows and events in the former World Fair pavilion by Karl Schwanzer, subsequently transferred to the Belvedere Gallery in early summer 2002.
Even if one considers solely the steel skeleton construction, transported in 1958 from Brussels to Vienna and glazed in situ, optical analogies arise between the edifice and the building blocks of a grammar of film. In this instance however the artist let a robotic arm do the work of creating a sequence of the individual frames by »tattooing« the sentence »Empty the Pond to get the Fish« onto the building word by word. The camera travels through the interior spaces of the edifice as if it were a writing implement, highlights details such as the windows or remnants from the structure’s life as a museum, and thus sketches out a fragmentary image of the building, which was designed as an exhibition space, and into which the fragmentary nature and contingency of (filmic) perception is inscribed in a sensual, experimental vein.
The ludic devices deployed by Runa Islam undermine Robert Bresson’s auteur film rules. Two older works in the exhibition however make clear that she also never loses sight of the question of control of her images: »Be The First To See What You See As You See It« is the title of a 16mm film by Runa Islam from 2004, probably the most striking example in this exhibition of the precision of her approach.
Once again we see a kind of showroom, this time displaying Chinese porcelain. The camera slowly moves over the pots, cups and plates displayed on pedestals and tables, which are being examined by a woman in parallel to the camera’s exploration. The woman circles cautiously around the carefully arranged objects, which at one point she also begins to touch.
Here the artist works with simple filmic means such as slow motion or rewind, and as the woman topples one precious object after another from the pedestals, gently yet with determination, the fragments are already coming together again on the floor below, with the film allowing viewers to watch the precisely staged intervention into the existing order slowly and repeatedly.
The aesthetic celebration of this action suggests a feminist interpretation of the work, and equally hints at an attempt to read these acts as a settling of scores with British imperialism. The Chinese tea service shatters into tiny pieces over and over again, and liberation fantasises inevitably bubble up as we watch the film unfold. However, in keeping with the title of the work, »Be The First To See What You See As You See It«, Islam avoids presenting a definitive reading of the meaning of the cinematic images. Instead it is much truer to say that these open up a broad interpretative field, in which there is just as much scope for political allusions to play out as there is for the aesthetic and narrative means of film as a medium, whose beginning and end slip as smoothly from the viewers’ grasp as the china slides out of the woman’s fingers.
At least superficially her third film, »First Day of Spring« (2005), moves away from an artificially orchestrated environment. The film, recorded in a park in Bangladesh, shows rickshaw drivers, usually associated with the bustling traffic and hectic chaos of Asian megacities.
Runa Islam contrasts these images with footage she has recorded, in which she intervenes with a striking degree of restraint compared with the other two films; the background sounds have probably been reduced and the sequence of the images has been slightly extended – the camera pans slowly over the drivers, resting in the shade, and their rickshaws, once again blurring the distinction between politics, aesthetics and contemplation.
Translated by Helen Ferguson