Claudio's Thesis - printing page

27-02-2024 - Notes on Runa Islam's Meroë (2012) and Peng Zuqiang's Déjà vu

These are some observations on two works that I recently came across as potentially relevant references for the piece that I intend to make with the 16mm footage of the Greek statues (titled SENSORS in the project proposal)

The first one is the film Meroë by artist Runa Islam.

Excerpt from an exhibition text:

Using the technique of double exposure, Islam carefully overlays images of an antique bronze head of a Roman emperor with a replica plaster cast produced by the British Museum after its acquisition. The two versions – the ‘original’ and its ‘duplicate’ – merge and diverge. Short sequences show the head from all angles; the back, the front, the sides. Whilst the two heads remain in different collections in different locations, each film frame becomes a new site in which the distances between original and copy are diffused, and the casting process is reversed.

This work - which, I have to state, I have only known through still images from exhibitions - seems to feature both similarities and differences with what I intend to make, and therefore feels like a useful one to reflect on.

- The subject is somehow similar: a scanning observation of a bust from ancient times - and its modern copy - on 16mm film, presented as a loop. 16mm's inherent material qualities activate a reflection about - and between - reality and its depictions, the world and its representations, the shift between original and its copies.

- Islam's film is built as a series of carefully crafted double exposure shots, precisely and meticolously composed. Everything is under control. The materiality of the film is there and, of course, yet it doesn't seem to be excessively exploited/used/ - no marks, traces, artefacts on its surface. Islam's images are clean and crisp.

- Islam's focus is on the full face of the two statues. She is interested in them as full object(s) - which are clearly presented as a remnants of a bigger body.

My film will be showing a series of closeups of eyes from a wider selection of statues. So, not one specific object filmed from different angles, extensivley, but an extensive compilation of similar objects, filmed in a recursive manner.

Yet, my subject choice will be as specific as the one made by Islam for her film, as all the statues will be specifically belonging to the Classical Greek period (V-VI century BC), and chosen in relation to the specific way their - now lost - eyes were crafted in those times. I am planning to go find such statues either in the Greek section of the Louvre museum in Paris or in the National Museum of Athens.

I want to film them from up close, as abstracted forms of holes, scars, scratches, marks, that one recognizes as eye-like shapes. These shapes emerge as traces, marks on the face of these statues, and will be rendered and seen as light traces on/through the surface of the film. I am interested specifically in the value of those traces, in their being remnant of once realistic depictions of eyes. I am interested in echoing this through the film material, as well as activating a process of looking at these shapes to look for the eyes, and of feeling looked at reversely in the meantime. I am no interested in showing the full facial features or bodies of these statues, which would be misleading for the purpose of my work..

Eyes are looking back at the viewer in Islam's work too. An interplay of gazes is going on in her work too for sure, yet it seems to be a side element in her work, while in mine, it will be the main thing at stake. An interesting element in the display of Islam's work is that the film is not projected on a plain wall, but on a custom-made plaster screen/surface, whose material matches with the copy version of the statue present in the work, seemingly building a parallel between that copy and the same status of copy of the imagery of the film - and of all representations. This reminds me of considering the surface of the projection, its physical qualities as inherent element to the piece. I was thinking of having a a slighlty reflective surface as a screen, that would let the projector's light source appear as a slight reflection somewhere in the center of the screen, interfering - and somehow "blinding" - the projected images of the eyes.

The second work that I would like to consider is Dejà Vu by artist Peng Zuqiang, which I have recently seen installed in an exhibition in Torino, Italy.

Again, an excerpt from a description of the work:

A 16mm film projection unveils an abstract, flickering black and white image of a vertical line in constant movement. For this work, the artist exposed 30 meters of metal wire directly onto 30 meters of film negative. The line that emerges is the trace left by the object on the celluloid material. The metal wire, here, may be read in all its ambivalence, as a device for entrapment, as a tool of escape from high rise building, or of erotic pleasure even.

The work is completed by a sound track, a first-person narrative through his own and others' memories of bodily injuries in the public and private sphere.

The line in Déjà vu becomes an ontology for the thin membrane, characterized by afflictive transfers and the perpetual inscribing and exposure of memories, emotions, and sensations—analogous to the presence of the film itself and the pervasive sonic and mechanical clatter of the 16mm film projector.

A 3D-printed clay replica of a precious Qing dynasty calligraphy brush rest on the window seat in the exhibition space. Originally made of jade-like opaque glass and to be found in the households of royals, artists, or poets (usually men), the brush rest is molded in the shape of a kneeling naked boy leaning forward on the floor and translates into an object of status (and perhaps homoerotic desire). Just like the imprint of a wire left on the celluloid of the film, the visceral cracks and wounds on the artist’s copy’s head and body testify to a longstanding history of violence and objectification of vulnerable subjects.

I am mostly interested in this work for the strategies used in its installation form rather than its thematic content, which is rather distant from the field I am moving on.

- The way the film loop is displayed - vertically hanging from the ceiling, right above the projector which is placed on the floor - is possibly one of the simplest to set up, but also intriguing for me as it "presents" the almost full length of the film, which is visible as an object in the space (other film loop systems are way less explicit in presenting the film material). More than that, I am interested in the vertical scrolling movement of the film - enhanced by such setup - which I imagine would resonate by contrast with the predominant horizontality of the scanning movements in the webcam piece, further articulating their relation beyond the digital vs analog comparison.

- The installation is completed by two other elements: a sound piece, with a narrating voice, and a small 3d-printed sculpture on a small shelf. They both add further layers of meaning to the relatively bare and simple film projection, opening up cross references and relations of scales, dimensions, temporalities that the film projection alone would not have. This is a very similar strategy to what I am thinking for the grad show. A constellation of relatively simple, standalone elements, each with their own agency and yet parts of one single body of work and research that investigates the same questions. I am also working on a text-based element - which will probably become a scrolling animation on a small screen - as a device to bring in a personal narrative that further enriches the rest of the project, as well as a small sculptural element - a 3d printed/laser-cut copy of a prototype for a bionic eye sensor based on the only image available of it online, which would somehow mirror the "lost" eyes of the statues shown in the film, and further articulate the discourse about human relation to seeing.