PIXEL GALLERY, 156 Augusta, Kensington market, Toronto
Feb 13 to 28
Start Dreaming (2007)
Eshrat Erfanian
In her earlier work, Erfanian’s 2003 series, Vestigium II (from the Latin, trace) consists of still video-images of industrial architecture and cargo ships. Bringing to a standstill the industrialized world, the images transform it into landscapes subject not of documentation (like Bernd and Hilla Becher), but scrutinizes its two hundred year old uncannyness. Without psychologizing them like Antonioni, the images somehow tame industry’s ruins; and instead of illustrating the textual references, they are dislocated from their captions, pointing at the ungraspable imaginary of the transnational fluxes of capital and the traffic of goods and bodies.
Start Dreaming is a double projection in adjacent walls. On one side, we see images that recall Vestigium II. The image is brought again to a standstill, yet this time, not to be examined but to watch objectively: The static camera passively observes the landscape unfold before it, capturing surveillance-like images from the suburb of Toronto (Vaughan) from afar and of pre-World War II housing in Berlin, seen from the neighborly within – STASI-style. They appear next to images of four model cities made up of Bauhaus toy housing that are based on actual blueprints of ideal living arrangements. Filmed from an aerial perspective, the camera travels above the models, which are spinning rhythmically on their axis. Suddenly, the urban arrangements implode and fall apart, accompanied (or prompted?) by unexpected explosions.
The surveillance footage from Vaughan and Berlin recalls Michel Haneke’s film of 2005, Caché. The film begins with a four-minute still shot of the outside of a middle-class Parisian household. As viewers, we are not sure whose point of view we are made to identify with: The surveillance camera’s? The stalker’s? Is the footage part of the narrative? In the film, the image rewinds and we realize that we had been watching, with the two main characters, a tape of a view of their house that has been sent to them anonymously. This detachment from the determination of the subject by the image draws a distinction between subjective perception and the mechanized gaze of surveillance. And yet, we all wonder, who is videotaping them? The patriarch’s search for the stalker brings back France’s colonial past and the character’s guilt for remaining personally complicit with the crimes of empire. In Caché, as in Erfanian’s installation, it becomes evident that suspicion of others gets translated into obsession with safety, and that guilt which is catalyzed by fear, is indissociable from forms of control. Both fear and guilt are mobilizing emotions complicit with “preventive” policies that propel social hierarchization and the upkeeping of hegemony. Brian Massumi has written about how power mobilizes affect as a form of control, addressing the post 9/11 color code of the threat of terrorism, purporting collective paranoia. This is hinted at subtly in Start Dreaming by flashing red, orange and yellow flickers interspersed within the footage.
A paranoid reading of the installation might convey the idea that it invokes anarchic destruction. Yet, it questions, and in a more prophetic vein, it foresees the implosion of the second half of the 20th century’s living utopia, which is subject to the interests of capital. The installation further questions contemporary urban planning tendencies and how gated communities (Orange County as the North American paradigm as well as Sao Paulo, Mexico City, Johannesburg, Buenos Aires, etc.) that host the world’s privileged affect the social tissue: by many accounts, such living configurations purport paranoia, isolation, the degree zero of public space, and fuel car culture to the detriment of more ecologically minded, collective transportation systems –again, all subject to the Neoliberal trends that are now imploding globally.
Start Dreaming also points at how we think about forms of control, which has ceased to be only a question of permanent visibility and constant visualization (the panopticon), and how it is now manifesting by way of organization of space, as a kind of urban panopticon.
The quirky explosions in Start Dreaming allow for the real to manifest (the unconscious in Lacanian) as the return of the repressed, which is the virtual layer of fear that is proper to the gated suburban living utopia. The idea of “dreaming” makes a plea for a new utopia and for unmediated image-production, away from the prevailing register of visibility, which is “reality” as visual truth. Finally, Start Dreaming bridges the gap between the two current modes of societal control: visualization and urban planning, highlighting the collective’s urge for safety and its paranoia of being stalked as the internalization of the panopticon. In advanced capitalism, it is the arrangement of collective life that is the political stake, having gone far beyond denouncing capitalism (resilient to interruptions), or spectacle as a paradigm for battles of visibility.
Irmgard Emmelhainz
2009
Irmgard Emmelhainz earned her PhD at the University of Toronto with a thesis on "Jean-Luc Godard and the Palestine Question". She has published widely on Godard and contemporary art, and currently lives in Mexico city where she also teaches cinema analysis. She has published extensively on contemporary art and cinema in magazines and journals across the world. Her book of essays forthcoming in Spanish on aesthetics and geopolitics.
Feb 13 to 28
Start Dreaming (2007)
Eshrat Erfanian
In her earlier work, Erfanian’s 2003 series, Vestigium II (from the Latin, trace) consists of still video-images of industrial architecture and cargo ships. Bringing to a standstill the industrialized world, the images transform it into landscapes subject not of documentation (like Bernd and Hilla Becher), but scrutinizes its two hundred year old uncannyness. Without psychologizing them like Antonioni, the images somehow tame industry’s ruins; and instead of illustrating the textual references, they are dislocated from their captions, pointing at the ungraspable imaginary of the transnational fluxes of capital and the traffic of goods and bodies.
Start Dreaming is a double projection in adjacent walls. On one side, we see images that recall Vestigium II. The image is brought again to a standstill, yet this time, not to be examined but to watch objectively: The static camera passively observes the landscape unfold before it, capturing surveillance-like images from the suburb of Toronto (Vaughan) from afar and of pre-World War II housing in Berlin, seen from the neighborly within – STASI-style. They appear next to images of four model cities made up of Bauhaus toy housing that are based on actual blueprints of ideal living arrangements. Filmed from an aerial perspective, the camera travels above the models, which are spinning rhythmically on their axis. Suddenly, the urban arrangements implode and fall apart, accompanied (or prompted?) by unexpected explosions.
The surveillance footage from Vaughan and Berlin recalls Michel Haneke’s film of 2005, Caché. The film begins with a four-minute still shot of the outside of a middle-class Parisian household. As viewers, we are not sure whose point of view we are made to identify with: The surveillance camera’s? The stalker’s? Is the footage part of the narrative? In the film, the image rewinds and we realize that we had been watching, with the two main characters, a tape of a view of their house that has been sent to them anonymously. This detachment from the determination of the subject by the image draws a distinction between subjective perception and the mechanized gaze of surveillance. And yet, we all wonder, who is videotaping them? The patriarch’s search for the stalker brings back France’s colonial past and the character’s guilt for remaining personally complicit with the crimes of empire. In Caché, as in Erfanian’s installation, it becomes evident that suspicion of others gets translated into obsession with safety, and that guilt which is catalyzed by fear, is indissociable from forms of control. Both fear and guilt are mobilizing emotions complicit with “preventive” policies that propel social hierarchization and the upkeeping of hegemony. Brian Massumi has written about how power mobilizes affect as a form of control, addressing the post 9/11 color code of the threat of terrorism, purporting collective paranoia. This is hinted at subtly in Start Dreaming by flashing red, orange and yellow flickers interspersed within the footage.
A paranoid reading of the installation might convey the idea that it invokes anarchic destruction. Yet, it questions, and in a more prophetic vein, it foresees the implosion of the second half of the 20th century’s living utopia, which is subject to the interests of capital. The installation further questions contemporary urban planning tendencies and how gated communities (Orange County as the North American paradigm as well as Sao Paulo, Mexico City, Johannesburg, Buenos Aires, etc.) that host the world’s privileged affect the social tissue: by many accounts, such living configurations purport paranoia, isolation, the degree zero of public space, and fuel car culture to the detriment of more ecologically minded, collective transportation systems –again, all subject to the Neoliberal trends that are now imploding globally.
Start Dreaming also points at how we think about forms of control, which has ceased to be only a question of permanent visibility and constant visualization (the panopticon), and how it is now manifesting by way of organization of space, as a kind of urban panopticon.
The quirky explosions in Start Dreaming allow for the real to manifest (the unconscious in Lacanian) as the return of the repressed, which is the virtual layer of fear that is proper to the gated suburban living utopia. The idea of “dreaming” makes a plea for a new utopia and for unmediated image-production, away from the prevailing register of visibility, which is “reality” as visual truth. Finally, Start Dreaming bridges the gap between the two current modes of societal control: visualization and urban planning, highlighting the collective’s urge for safety and its paranoia of being stalked as the internalization of the panopticon. In advanced capitalism, it is the arrangement of collective life that is the political stake, having gone far beyond denouncing capitalism (resilient to interruptions), or spectacle as a paradigm for battles of visibility.
Irmgard Emmelhainz
2009
Irmgard Emmelhainz earned her PhD at the University of Toronto with a thesis on "Jean-Luc Godard and the Palestine Question". She has published widely on Godard and contemporary art, and currently lives in Mexico city where she also teaches cinema analysis. She has published extensively on contemporary art and cinema in magazines and journals across the world. Her book of essays forthcoming in Spanish on aesthetics and geopolitics.