ahead
2008
HD Video projected on a 6-8m tilted screen
18 minutes 43 seconds
SD video on Monitor
3 minutes looped
2 channel audio
Rescue blankets on floor
The work is a three-part installation consisting of a large-scale HD video projection and a separate video on a monitor placed elsewhere in the room. The video is accompanied by an intermittent soundtrack. The installation is displayed in an open space, and there are a number of thick rescue blankets on the floor for the audience to sit or lie on.
The projection is shown on a large-scale free-standing, vertical tilted screen made of aluminium, filling the available space almost floor-to-ceiling.
Shot in a single take and without edits, the scene shows a snow hillside in the Arctic, in evening light. A group of young people appear in the bottom of the screen, carrying another young woman backwards towards the top of the frame. Dressed in casual clothes, they move through the snow, forming a human conveyor belt and taking turns at the front of the procession. The woman glides over their bodies, feet forward, progressing through the frame. The prints and tracks they leave behind record the peculiarity of their task.
The second part of the work is an examination of the detail of the first scene. A hand-held video camera records details of the large projection, in a fast-paced edit. The quality of the resulting image – recorded, projected, re-recorded and finally displayed on a smaller monitor – adds to the dynamic nature of the observation. The process of selecting details and assembling them into a sequence with its own story resembles that of re-editing news footage.
In the soundtrack, all that is illustrative has been taken away, and the image is allowed to stand on its own. The sound is out of sync with the projection, and enlarges the territory of the work.
The group of people on the first screen is out of place and engaged in a strange ritual. The observation in the monitor draws attention to some of the less obvious elements of this story, bringing up selected aspects and assembling them into a new body. This observation is reminiscent of the way we interpret complex scenes in painting, where a hidden detail might be the most memorable. The record of the story itself is placed under surveillance, thus intrinsically altering the dynamism of the original recording and the original scene itself.