The Long Take: Videos on architecture and social space at the Audain Gallery exhibits videos by Mark Lewis, Terrence Grower, Dorit Magreiter, Clemens von Wedemeyer, and Judith Hopf in collaborationg with Natascha Sadr Haghighian. The exhibition is open from January 13th through to February 26th and consists of a series of video projections with accompanying sound elements (in most cases). The work I found most engaging of these pieces was Terrence Growers Ciudad Moderna. This video was composed of reedited pieces of a film Despedida de Casada and made to investigate the architecture within the film. The work shows a variety of scenes which freeze frame and remove the film image replacing it with a graphic representation of the architectural space within which the scene was taking place. The video was accompanied by salsa music that ran throughout the length of the piece.
I was initially drawn to this work because of the visual aspects of the film. It stood out from the rest of the pieces in the show because of the colour depth and quality of footage, which is so enigmatic of the older era of movies. Initially the visual shift between photographic representation to the graphic analyses of the architectural space was a bit jarring however it gave an interesting rhythm to the piece. The audio component of the piece could only be heard through the use of headphones attached to a bench and so predicated the viewing distance and number of viewers for the piece. The use of headphones made the piece much more immersive and allowed a greater sense of engagement within the video. The work, though not participatory in the classical sense, allowed for an investment and participation through engaging a multitude of the senses and facilitating a kind of immersion within the video.
Ciudad Moderna seemed to be about observing the architecture and setting within the narrative as opposed to the narrative itself. The movie from which all the clips were taken is based on architecture fostering human relationships and narrative; a husband and wife want to divorce but own equal parts of their apartment and so are forced to continue to live together. I found the examination of the setting over the people within it brings about a concentration on the narrative surrounding architecture and man made objects as a whole. It’s often forgotten that nothing in our modern environment occurs naturally, that every thing we experience was conceptualized, created and installed by someone. This work refocuses the viewer on the environment and what it consists of to help us understand its often ignored importance. The setting in this way tells us just as important a story as the actors themselves. Speculatively then, we could also say that Ciudad Moderna looks at the utopian ideals that are apart of the modernist ideology due to the style of the architecture examined and the title of the piece. These ideologies of a perfect and hopeful future exist in the background as the human drama plays out in front of it however in Ciudad Moderna, the background is allowed to take precedence.
The exhibit as a whole offered a variety of meditations upon different notions of space and architecture and successfully engaged these ideas on a variety of levels. The seclusion in which each piece could be experienced helped to amplify their individual meaning however seemed to alienate them from one another and created a more fractured exhibit. Ciudad Moderna presented its ideas in a slightly visually obtrusive manner but still managed to exhibit its investigation in an elegant way. Some of the other films however were more difficult to access in terms of their meaning and so they may discourage a less motivated audience. Although this more elusive meaning does provides a chance to search more deeply within works or even simply appreciate their aesthetic qualities.
This examination of space and architecture gave an uncanny and oddly intimate appreciation of a variety of spaces. Through reframing an accepted view upon the man made structures surrounding us all it managed to create a new appreciation of the places we exist within.
