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Love.com. Audio installation
by Sylvia Rodriguez Where is this? Video installation by Katya
Loher Transparent Rendez-vous On 17 December 2005, the exhibition entitled Love.com by Swiss video artists Sylvia Rodriguez and Katya Loher opened in the exhibition hall of the State Hermitage's Youth Center. The show has been organized with assistance from the State Center of Modern Art (St Petersburg) within the framework of the program Topical Art of the 20th and 21st Centuries. Young people of St Petersburg have been offered the chance to see Sylvia Rodriguez' audio installation Where is this? and Katya Loher's video installation Transparent Rendez-vous. Sylvia Rodriguez' work is devoted to the very topical subject of hostages. It is based on what happened to the French journalist Florence Aubenas. The journalist from the newspaper Liberation was abducted in Iraq and was kept in captivity for several months. Photographs of trees, structures resembling huts - all create a mis-en-scene entitled A Clearing in the Forest, at the same time as . loudspeakers carry threats mixed up with complaints, the noise of a struggle and the sounds of "living nature." All of this serves as the background for the main action, and the principal thing in the installation is the voices of the "victims" themselves: seven personages think aloud in Russian, English and French about what happened to their children, parents and lovers in their absence, whether they were loved by them in actual fact, and if yes, then why didn't they pay the ransom for their release. They wonder whether the relatives now believe in their deaths. In the final analysis, as the artist remarks, all of this questioning comes down to one thing: "how much is love worth." The fact that the main personalities in this story are apparently dead only intensifies the importance of this question. In contrast to Sylvia Rodriguez, Katya Loher tries in her work to create three dimensional video images and audio-video space. In her installation Transparent Rendez-vous she projects her video on three white inflatable spheres floating in space just below the ceiling of the exhibition hall. The heroes of Transparent Rendez-vous are a couple in love who live under water and in reduced gravity. The method she used in making this work is unique in a certain sense. Part of the project was filmed under water in the swimming pool of the Hilton Hotel in Basel. In the closing section, Loher combines the resulting images with material shot "on the surface" in the real world. The couple from Transparent Rendez-vous meet at a floating table and sit on floating chairs. In their world "everything is in motion and changing" in the direct sense of the word: objects float away from their hands and the actors themselves are constantly forced to come to the surface for a breath of fresh air. Moving freely between the physical world and the world of imagination, they constantly go from one reality to another, from dream to reality and back again, wanting what is impossible and at the same time aware of the very impossibility of their desires. Katya Loher is the winner of the Swiss television prize CreaTVity Award (2004) and also of the Kunstcredit Prize (2004) of the city of Basel. She was born in Switzerland and now lives in New York. She works in the genre of video as well as audio and video performances. In 2002 Katya Loher founded the group "Video Orchestra" together with Sylvia Beckman. The group has frequently participated in international festivals and appeared at the largest centers of modern art around Europe. By bringing together sound, image and performance, the artists of "Video Orchestra" create at their own concerts a total audio-video milieu in which they are both authors and spectators. Sylvia Rodriguez works with various media, combining in her installations photos, video and slide projections and real objects as well as specially built constructions. Her works are reminiscent of theater decorations in which different kinds of dramas from modern life are played out. All of Rodriguez' works are based on real events. They may be tales related by a Japanese woman met by chance in a temple (Espace Vema, 2004) or the story of the catastrophe aboard a Senagalese boat which was covered extensively in the mass media (Flop: Sink&Float). Pushing away from reality, she relates the story from the standpoint of several personages, thereby creating several parallel versions of what happened. In the end the main characters are not present: we do not see them but we hear only their voices, which are delivered as endless monologues amidst the desolate decorations. The exhibition is open until 29 December 2005. |
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Copyright © 2006 State Hermitage Museum |
