Frame Line Break (preliminary notes on vigilant temporality)
HD video, colour, sound
9'54"
2017
Produced in the context of the international residency at Seoul Museum of Art Nanji, South Korea
A line of police, along a road, tracing a city.
A line as a barrier, a tactic of antagonism, captured in the kettle and the blockade, irreducible in form to simply belonging to "the left". A line in time, presenting history as linear progress, capital's insistence on labour as necessity, its foreclosures on imagination. A line, a border, the imagined containment of sovereignty, nation states that always already erases and excludes. A line as a phrase, a platitude for vigilance between allegiances, enforcing worldviews made essential, seemingly inescapable. A line as a cut, a possibility of rupture from a certain time and space. In the backing frame, a video shot during a mass demonstration in Seoul in December 2015 follows a continuous line of police, while a contiguous soundtrack of percussion and wind instruments carries the energy of permissible performance. Intercut with footage from other locales and moments recorded since 2014, including online found material, a disembodied textual voice traverses this line, and other lines, thinking through what it might really take to break them. |
Video stills