Marijke van Warmerdam. Time is Ticking

It is the first project of the State Hermitage Museum that is entirely dedicated to video art, one of the most advanced and rapidly developing areas of modern art. With the opening of this exhibition on the eve of the 250-year anniversary of the State Hermitage, the Department of Modern Art launches a series of projects aimed at the introduction to the museum visitors of both classic examples of the genre and the works of young artists.

Marijke van Warmerdam is a Dutch artist working with various media, from painting and sculpture to photography and video, but she is most famous for her short looped films. The first major international success came to her in 1995 at the Venice Biennale. Subsequently, she participated in numerous exhibitions, including Documenta X in Kassel as well as in the Berlin and Sydney Biennale. In 2011, the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam prepared a major retrospective of the artist. Her works are displayed in the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston and the Centre Pompidou in Paris.

In her minimalist and plotless looped films Van Warmerdam concentrates on simple objects and situations separating them from their original context and turning into a kind of a thing in itself, noumenon, with the help of endless repetition. The viewer is drawn into a hypnotic process of observation, experience, and, ultimately, of co-creation. The artist works with laconic and seemingly obvious plots, paying attention to the slow and gradual transformation of reality transmitting weightless life pattern in time.

At the exhibition four classic short films are presented: “Wind”, “Couple”, “Light” and “In the distance”, made in 2010 and combined into the “Life” cycle. Complemented by the new works of the artist on fabric, they will become part of the installation focusing on the study of time as a special environment and its properties. Two videos: “Couple” and “In the Distance” are structured using a single motif: an elderly couple contemplating a picturesque pond. In the first video, the camera makes an intricate ellipse around them, and in the second it is gradually changing the focus from the misted window to the characters seated behind it. In “Wind” the camera follows leaves, plastic wrappers and a feather swirling against a background of an industrial landscape. In “Light” the static camera captures the artist’s hand as if strumming something on the louvers, through which the rays of light make their way.

Short films of Van Warmerdam are complemented by her works on fabric. Pillows with prints representing a wave of a hand and twelve large woolen blankets with pictures of dials further elevate the artist’s idea of the time. A part of the drawings was made by elderly people during a health survey. The frozen time on these dials resonates with the ever-repetitive film motion, focusing on the present moment.

Curator of the exhibition – Nadezhda Sinyutina, Department of Contemporary Art at the State Hermitage Museum. 

The exhibition is held within International Festival of Arts "Diaghilev PS”.
The exhibition is supported by Mondriaan Foundation, Center for International Cooperation Dutch Culture, Wilhelmina E. Jansen Foundation, (Netherlands Consulate-General in St. Petersburg, Benthem Crouwel Architects, AaBe Textiles Trading B.V.)