Moving Image Installation Research Articles

Changing identity, roots, plurality, fluidity: The film and video installations of Singaporean artists

Abstract Drawing upon the film and video installations of Singaporean artists Ho Tzu Nyen and Ming Wong, this article aims to make a critical enquiry into methodological and theoretical intersections between film and fine art. Drawing from the cultural particularities of Singapore, there are dimensions in these artists’ works that are relevant for the discussion of an imaginative identification with local histories. Contested issues relating to representation, identity, roots, performativity and history are engaged and negotiated in their works. Ho and Wong foreground the significance of the Malay heritage in the Singaporean identity, notwithstanding being Chinese. The artists are careful to underline the notion that identities are constructed and fluid, and their works reveal a resistance against a singular, constructed definition or an essentialist interpretation of the Singapore national identity, in favour of one that is able to reflect pluralities of diverse societies and the multiplicity of culture. The endeavours to devise alternative modes of exhibition in the art gallery are directed in part at transforming the exhibition environment and how viewers relate to the artwork. In their moving image installations, Ho Tzu Nyen and Ming Wong have developed various visual strategies that explore the dynamic relation between filmic space and time. Proposing a more fluid approach in the understanding of spectatorial positions, both artists have produced a visual and experiential language that enable the audience to develop a new consciousness about their environment and themselves. By engaging the aural-visual, conceptual and physical aspects of the artists’ works, the analysis of the moving image as a series of assertions made within the fields of contemporary art and film seeks to explore new possibilities about what is meant by the ‘cinematic’ in Singapore.

Dance History in Contemporary Visual Art Practice: Kelly Nipper’s Weather Center

Kelly Nipper’s video installation Weather Center (2009) is emblematic of the presence of dance in recent visual art. Nipper’s persistent fascinations with Mary Wigman, Laban Movement Analysis, and expansive notation practices result in live performances, moving-image installations, and photographs, creating visual art that reveals how dance and its particular histories can function as malleable material within the museum.

In Excess, Elsewhere and Otherwise: Feminine Subjectivity in Eija-Liisa Ahtila’s multi-screen installation If 6 Was 9 (1995)

This paper engages with the concept of ‘elsewhere’ in the feminist philosophy of Luce Irigaray as a way to theorise the experience of viewing the audio-visual installations of Finnish artist, Eija-Liisa Ahtila. Ahtila’s work traces specific narratives concerning feminine desire and subjectivity across multi-screen apparatus in gallery environment. The space of exhibition and film form initiate a mode of encounter that motivates a different relation of projector, screen and viewer. Ahtila’s multi-screen installations insist that we look to the places of exclusion in discourse and to the silences in representation for meaning elsewhere, in excess and otherwise. The exclusion in discourse is for Luce Irigaray of course the feminine. Irigaray articulates a view that textually and performatively demands we recognise the impossibility of a feminine position. I take up this problematic with specific attention to how Ahtila’s audiovisual installation If 6 Was 9 (Jos 6 olis 9, 1995) produces and disrupts traditional cinematic representation to examine how the space of installation, multi-screen form and the filmic space lend itself to a different encounter with the cinematic. By tracing the concept of ‘elsewhere’ in philosophical and audio-visual texts, the article develops and refines a position from which one might view contemporary cinematic experience. KEYWORDS Luce Irigaray, Eija-Liisa Ahtila, feminism, feminist film, moving image installation, expanded cinema, gallery film

Installation of the Exotic

INSTALLATION OF THE EXOTIC Film and audiovisual installations have increasingly taken place in the art world in recent years extending and renewing the range of activities in the fine art domain. Tracing its origins to expanded cinema and video art in the 1970s, moving image installation is now ubiquitous in public museums and private galleries. This is at a time when access to experimental work via public service versions of television has now all but disappeared.(1) In the two decades since, as television channels have proliferated, choice has actually narrowed. Moving image installations are visible in a diversity of art environments from gallery spaces to site-specific work in urban or industrial pop-ups. Multi-screen configurations are not easily arranged in cinemas or easily watched on television sets, let alone computers. The small portable digital screens may issue a blizzard of information and imagery everyday, but their size and scale...

Filmic Bodies: Transgressing Boundaries between Filmic and Real Space

ABSTRACTConventional cinema constructs a strict demarcation between filmic space and the architecture of the auditorium. In acknowledging the constructed nature of the filmic situation, moving image installation has the potential to transgress this metaphysical boundary between “virtual” and “real”: to establish an encounter with a figural presence. Here, our orientation toward the virtual image is brought into play, but in such a way that ambiguities of location problematize the spectator position, revealing the radical nonmateriality of the filmic image. Using examples of my own work and others, I examine how such works address an inherent filmic tension between the moving and still image, drawing upon photography’s spectral indexicality to blur the boundary between life and death.

Moving image installation, the embodied spectator of cinema and Amar Kanwar: Learning from intermediality

Abstract This article juxtaposes cinema and moving image installation to question the ways cinema studies has understood embodied spectatorship. Through a close study of Amar Kanwar’s moving image installation, The Sovereign Forest, exhibited at ‘documenta 13’, the article draws on an intermedial approach to explore emerging transformations in the phenomenological dynamics of the moving image. The article explores how the concrete, multisensory experience of Kanwar’s installation trains the sensorium of the viewer, opening new possibilities for the moving image. This concrete physicality serves as a point of reference to refocus and sharpen the understanding of the more complex kinaesthetic dimensions of cinema spectatorship.

The Disappearing Work: Chantal Akerman and Phenomenologies of the Ephemeral

In this article I argue that thresholds of attention or distraction provoke a phenomenological engagement with the ephemerality of moving image installations. Thus, patterns of spectatorial attention and distraction offer a potential methodology to examine ephemeral installations which exist for a limited duration, in particular in exhibition spaces. The article probes a range of conceptualizations of attention with relation to contemporary phenomenological film theory, and performance theory, in order to stage a reflective encounter with Chantal Akerman's recent installation, Marcher à côté de ses lacets dans un Frigidaire vide (To Walk Beside One's Shoelaces in an Empty Fridge, 2004). It ultimately argues that engaging with a phenomenology of the ephemeral may act as a corrective balance to the narrativizing and canon-building tendencies in recent film criticism of Akerman's work.

Moving Image Installations as Prototype Spatial Models of Interaction

Moving Image Installations as Prototype Spatial Models of Interaction

Between women: Gesture, intermediary and intersubjectivity in the installations of Agnès Varda and Chantal Akerman

ABSTRACTThe works of Agnès Varda and Chantal Akerman span two generations of female influence in the sphere of contemporary visual culture in France. Both film-makers have seized upon the richly intermedial potential of film, photography, video and installation, while acknowledging their own status as figures engaging with the marginal politics of auteurist film-making. This article interrogates how the recent installations, ‘Les Veuves de Noirmoutier/The Widows of Noirmoutier’ (Varda, 2005) and ‘Marcher à côté de ses lacets dans un frigidaire vide/To Walk next to One's Shoelaces in an Empty Fridge’ (Akerman, 2004), stage an encounter between the cinematic, ethical and spatial practices of each female auteur, the female subjects of their moving-image work, and their viewers. By invoking concepts of gesture from Giorgio Agamben, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and recent writing on dance and film, the article explores the intermedial potential of gesture as a framework for examining processes of meaning-making, spatial experimentation and spectatorial physicality in these recent moving-image installations.

What’s wrong with cinema in the gallery?

This article builds on my earlier research (e.g. on William Raban's site-specific work) into the contemporary problem of showing moving image work in art galleries. The misfit between works' formal strategies and their mode of presentation is an ongoing issue. The essay is based on a review of two exhibitions held in London in 2011 of video works by Philippe Parreno, and Douglas Gordon. Parreno's show was praised as novel and exemplary for the way in which it marshalled its audience from room to room to watch the films, but I argue that the relationship between the work and the way it is presented is arbitrary. In the case of Douglas Gordon’s show I argue that the work is a conventional movie masquerading as an installation. In each case I conduct a rigorous analysis of the work itself and how it has been installed. My writing is informed by formalist and constructivist approaches, and considers the relationship between the work's form and its output / presentation, paying attention specifically to the relationship between these two aspects, which I see as equally important. The article analyses contemporary exhibition practices in order to arrive at new theories and working methods for showing moving images in galleries. It draws attention to the tradition of exhibiting in alternative venues, where filmmakers, as opposed to gallery artists, have been much more successful in making moving image installations. The research aims to help artists and writers to better understand the issues and histories surrounding the making and showing of film and video in 'art' spaces. In a context where most art critics are not specifically informed about the history and theory of experimental film and video practice, the research seeks to raise the level of debate around video, and latterly film, projections in art galleries.

An Interview with Lucy Skaer of Henry VIII’s Wives

This interview took place on January 26, 2012 over Skype. I, Brianne Cohen, posed a series of questions to Lucy Skaer about three of Henry VIIIs’s Wives’ artworks presented in this volume of Contemporaneity – Spiral Betty (2004), Mr. Hysteria (2005), and The Returning Officer (2009) – in order to draw out thematic connections not only among the art collective’s moving-image installations, but also throughout their larger, diverse oeuvre. The six members of Henry VIII’s Wives live and work in different cities, but have collaborated and exhibited together since 1997, primarily in Europe. I am thankful to Lucy Skaer for her thoughtful answers and to Henry VIII’s Wives for permission to present their video and filmic work.The interview serves to introduce an artist portfolio containing three videos – Spiral Betty, Mr. Hysteria, and The Returning Officer – by the art collective Henry VIII’s Wives.

‘Embodied Criticality’ in Moving-image Installations by Wang Gongxin and Zhang Peili

ABSTRACTThis article will examine Wang Gongxin's and Zhang Peili's moving-image installations, critically reviewing their relationships with spaces they inhabit and are inhabited by as a dominant issue in these works. I argue that both artists are globally engaged and art-historically informed agent, fully aware of the complexity of their living spaces in their transcultural and historical entanglements and therefore that these artworks are constituted by interrogations of art's critical capacities. Wang and Zhang seem to scrutinize and compare the critical potential of a representational understanding of art that places its emphasis on objectification. In doing so, a distanced and analytic spectatorship is challenged in favour of a performative concept that emphasizes the mediating quality of art through a participant viewer. Their artistic interventions implicitly propose the concept of the artist and the viewer as embodied participants and constituents of the artwork, as opposed to a dualistic and distanced relationship.

Expanded Architecture 01-06

The exposition of practice-based research is focused on using moving image installation to reflect upon our relationship to architecture. Through a site-specific practice, existing architectural elements are re-framed, re-focused and projected back onto themselves — either through the content of the moving image, or the construction of the installation. The exposition considers what this series of works have revealed about the use of moving image installation to reflect upon our relationship to architecture; particularly the possibility of creating tension between the architecture and the image, as well as the self in space.

Transmedia Memory of Albanian Migration in Italy: Helidon Gjergji's, Adrian Paci's, and Anri Sala's Moving-Image Installations

In this essay I analyze how, within the space of the museum, recent media installations by Albanian artists Helidon Gjergji, Adrian Paci, and Anri Sala appropriate, and critically engage with, multiple narratives about migration in Italy produced and circulated over the past two decades across various media, with particular attention to the Albanian case. The imaginary and material sites the spectator traverses in Gjergji’s, Paci’s, and Sala’s installations open up space for a new audiovisual discourse, one that is still indebted to, and yet distinct from, the televisual and the cinematographic, as it emerges from the double relationship between on-screen and off-screen space, as well as between collective and personal history. Installation in the museum thus produces a transmedia memory, which simultaneously criticizes the televisual reality effect as well as Italian progressive representations of the Albanian migrant as a screen onto which Italians can project their own history of emigration, as is the case with Oliviero Toscani’s advertising campaign Boat for Benetton (1992) and Gianni Amelio’s feature film Lamerica (1994). Drawing on the scholarship on self-reflexive spectatorship by Elizabeth Cowie and Catherine Fowler, among others, I analyze how these Albanian artists invite the spectator to explore the virtual space on screen, the material space off screen, and the screen itself as an object, in order to prompt a different identification with the migrant figure in Italy.

‘No Diving’: Recovered Film and Recovered Memories

‘No Diving’ was a site-specific oral history and moving image installation funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund that examined the lido at Hilsea, Portsmouth as a locus for memories and recollections by the local community. The project set out to recover archive film of the building and record oral history interviews contextualising this found material, which would eventually be re-projected on to the building as a site-specific event. The project brought the artist to a personal, and the community to a collective moment of catharsis as the images and voices played over the lido superstructure. For the artist: a moment where personal and family history colludes with the sense of belonging embodied within an architectural space. For the community: a moment of reflection and re-projection of collective memories in which archive films and oral histories relocate the past within the present. The project was designed as an experimental/experiential documentary system that would engage with the community as producers of their own historical identity. The project questioned the nature of documentary since the real documentary could only be shown at the lido as a live performance event in which the audience participated as observers and the observed. In this way, the building served as a bi-directional apparatus, which simultaneously captures and re-projects historical identities through the camera lens of the project process. This project model is transferable and can be pointed at any building or architectural location. It turns a building into a living museum; a site of community practice that produces history and re-circulates identities.

Of other worlds: nature and the supernatural in the moving image installations of Jaki Irvine

It is possible to trace a fascination with the supernatural, often aligned to the exploration of place, within recent artists' film and video. Otherworldly figures appear in an array of video installations, from Stasi City (Jane and Louise Wilson, 1997), The House (Eija-Liisa Ahtila, 2002), Baltimore (Isaac Julien, 2003) to Ghost Story (Willie Doherty, 2007), and recur within various publications exploring the materialities of artists' film, video and photography.1 My discussion here is specifically concerned with the evocation of ‘other worlds’ in Jaki Irvine's installation The Silver Bridge (2002) and it examines the interplay between natural and supernatural phenomena in this work, informed by Fredric Jameson's theorization of the ‘ghost story’. The rise of the supernatural was noted by Michael Newman as early as 1995 in an article that explores the work of several artists, including Irvine. Newman argues that ‘a sense of the enigmatic and the paranormal, of that which resists interpretation and understanding … is a feature distinguishing much contemporary [video] work from that of the sixties and seventies, which has a more rationalistic basis’.2 He suggests that the earlier generation of video artists often challenged formal rationality in the name of a more complete truth, potentially linked with a political project, while artists such as Irvine appear to reject the very possibility of a complete truth.