Remoteness
video-installation
video-installation
A video-installation inviting viewers to reflect upon the concept of remoteness in relationship to Arctic areas.
More about the project︎︎︎
More about the project︎︎︎
The British anthropologist Edwin Ardener argued in his text “Remote areas”: some theoretical considerations. about remoteness not being a matter of physical distances as much as a matter of conceptual spaces defined as a combination of real and imaginary places, characteristic by specific experiences we tend to believe to have with them. Such imaginaries of “remote” places shape our understanding until nowadays when it is tangible in locations like Greenland igniting hazardous fantasies of specific persons.
The video installation becomes an experiential laboratory of remoteness. Viewers only access the location of the unremote in front of the curtain. From there, they can only sight the remote through binoculars. A small screen in the remote corner of the room displays a video of the Ilulissat fjord - a stereotypical depiction of the Arctic. A physical space and a lot of unknown hiding in the darkness in between the binoculars and the small screen offer space for rethinking of the presumed conceptual spaces dividing the remote from the unremote. The viewers prompted to use the binoculars are framing their visual experience and thus are constantly reminded of their embodied presence. Their presence and the selectivity f the information they obtained is doubled by the video which is equally shot through binoculars. The circular frame of the binoculars keeps leaking into the rectangular frame of the camera with every subtle handshake of the person behind the camera itself.
In her text Travelling into the Dark: The Circumpolar North, Indigenous Art, and Settler Aesthetics of Remoteness the performance studies scholar Lindsey Drury reflects upon the role of arts in the reciprocal understanding and appreciation of distant communities, claiming that “each community comes to an understanding on its own terms, and remoteness remains between them. ‘Remote art’ is the aesthetic material passed between them, but as such, it does not trespass on the remoteness that isolates them.” The persisting remoteness isolating the west and Arctic areas is reflected upon in the installation as a space in between, a space that remains out of reach, yet, at the same time it is a link between the remote and the unremote.
The nature of the veil implies a construction site, where the space beyond it is under reconstruction. As viewers are rethinking the invisible barriers dividing them from the remote. Beyond the veil, there is darkness and human absence. The two are interrupted only for a reading and discussion session organized in the course of the exhibition.
A tradition of narratives of the Arctic from Marco Polo’s The Land of Darkness linking the north with the dark reveal a facet of stereotypes. Drury writes that it is “a darkness within which Europe and its settler descendants learned to see themselves illuminated against those they rendered obscure. To emerge from that darkness is not to bring light to others, but to confront the shadows that structure ways of seeing.”
The video installation becomes an experiential laboratory of remoteness. Viewers only access the location of the unremote in front of the curtain. From there, they can only sight the remote through binoculars. A small screen in the remote corner of the room displays a video of the Ilulissat fjord - a stereotypical depiction of the Arctic. A physical space and a lot of unknown hiding in the darkness in between the binoculars and the small screen offer space for rethinking of the presumed conceptual spaces dividing the remote from the unremote. The viewers prompted to use the binoculars are framing their visual experience and thus are constantly reminded of their embodied presence. Their presence and the selectivity f the information they obtained is doubled by the video which is equally shot through binoculars. The circular frame of the binoculars keeps leaking into the rectangular frame of the camera with every subtle handshake of the person behind the camera itself.
In her text Travelling into the Dark: The Circumpolar North, Indigenous Art, and Settler Aesthetics of Remoteness the performance studies scholar Lindsey Drury reflects upon the role of arts in the reciprocal understanding and appreciation of distant communities, claiming that “each community comes to an understanding on its own terms, and remoteness remains between them. ‘Remote art’ is the aesthetic material passed between them, but as such, it does not trespass on the remoteness that isolates them.” The persisting remoteness isolating the west and Arctic areas is reflected upon in the installation as a space in between, a space that remains out of reach, yet, at the same time it is a link between the remote and the unremote.
The nature of the veil implies a construction site, where the space beyond it is under reconstruction. As viewers are rethinking the invisible barriers dividing them from the remote. Beyond the veil, there is darkness and human absence. The two are interrupted only for a reading and discussion session organized in the course of the exhibition.
A tradition of narratives of the Arctic from Marco Polo’s The Land of Darkness linking the north with the dark reveal a facet of stereotypes. Drury writes that it is “a darkness within which Europe and its settler descendants learned to see themselves illuminated against those they rendered obscure. To emerge from that darkness is not to bring light to others, but to confront the shadows that structure ways of seeing.”
view of the installation from the point of view of the unremote
a view of the video screen through the binoculars
view from within the zone in between the unremote and the remote
stills from the video