'The Experimental Video Art Exhibition" on show at Bangkok Art & Culture Centre (BACC) is certainly not something meant to be easily comprehended. Visiting the venue, even after a second or third time, is always a puzzling and exhausting undertaking.
Robert Vater's TNT.
Curated by Komson Nookiew, Pascal Fendrich and Sabine Marte, this is the 11th edition of the Thai-European Friendship project and showcases a series of experimental videos from various Thai universities' students and artists from Europe.
And experimental these videos really are. The avant-garde aesthetics is obvious in more than 50 videos installed all over the seventh floor of BACC. From a video of a couple staring at each other in a green room for 14 minutes straight for no obvious reason, digitally distorted footage of scenes at some subway to a close-up shot of a woman who slaps her face until tears fall. They are anything but linear, coherent and straightforward.
In German artist Robert Vater's TNT, we see a weird and incomprehensible interaction between a man and a woman. Set in a green room, in which everything — coat hangers, a table, a chair, a vase with flowers and a typewriter — is painted green, we see a man trying to communicate something to a woman who has entered his room.
At first, he seems friendly, waving at her. The woman, however, seems to be staring straight through him as if he didn't exist. As time goes by, the man gets more and more upset by the woman's silence and expressionless face. He starts pounding the table, the only verbal expression for his frustration is a growling sound and a word "go".
Around the end comes another puzzling movement, the woman opens the door, steps forward before quickly stepping back. In the same rhythm as the woman, the man steps towards the woman before stepping back again and this movement repeats over and over again.
In Eva Weingartner's The Only Thing That's Real, we see a close-up footage of this artist exploring her face with her fingers and hands. With her eyes staring straight into the camera, she starts by tracing lightly different parts of face with her fingers, from her lips, cheeks, brows and forehead. Then after a while, she starts to slap her own face, harder and harder every time until tears begin to flow.
Watching these videos and a few others which are equally puzzling, at some point one might start wondering if all this is worth your time at all, whether these works were created simply for sake of being "experimental" and nothing more.
Or maybe they are actually so good that there are endless possibilities of how you can think about it, that they are never meant to be understood, but, at best, just pondered, speculated and felt.
Vater's absurdist incident in a green room could actually be a very realistic reflection on our present situation. The couple could be the picture of us, though being in an increasingly interconnected world of social media, who are even frustrated and at a loss when it comes to communicating and understanding one another. Weingartner's self-torture, on the other hand, could simply be her process of self-exploration. By recording her pain and tears on camera, she turns something personal into an experience that can be felt and shared.
From an incoherent plot line and an experiment on the artist herself as a subject, in quite a few works we see how the very techniques artists chose are actually the messages by themselves. In Maki Satake's Vestige Of Life, we see a combination of film and photography to represent a question of space and memory.
In Maki's film, we see a background footage of scenes after scenes a quiet, empty house. At right in front of the camera, however, the artists are holding photographs of residents of the house which have added characters into an otherwise empty space.
All the photographs were taken at exactly fitting angles to the film behind, and through stop motion techniques people in the photographs seem to have enlivened the deserted, vacant house again. It's almost a haunting combination of how it is right now and how it used to be.
There's also sound of the people which comes neither from the film nor the photographs. And the fact that the film itself, like the stop motion of photographs, doesn't run smoothly made this imitation of human experience even more believable. Because memories are just like that, we have the space and suddenly fragments of images would come rushing in, with the sound we haven't heard for years flooding in out of nowhere.
In the exhibition, there are some other videos which are more simple and straightforward, from Thai artist Panu Saeng-Xuto's Cycle Of Life, which captures prisoners shackles, to Austrian Heidrun Holzfeind's short documentary on a homeless man in Subway Talk.
To recount, capture or imitate human experience is indeed a complex and draining undertake. And while in some works we feel artists have produced works just for the sake of being labelled "experimental", in other cases, it's obvious artists are experimenting so that get as close to revealing those experiences as they can.
The 'Experimental Video Art Exhibition' is on show until Sept 21 at Bangkok Art & Culture Centre.
Eva Weingartner's The Only Thing That's Real.
Maki Satake's Vestige Of Life.
Heidrun Holzfeind's Subway Talk.
