Strategies and Tactics…
The following day I walk into the National Art gallery, lured by a huge banner ‘Strategies and Tactics’. I cannot resist. The title resonates so well.
Presented by The White House Biennal, Athens, and curated by Lydia Pribisova, work from Slovakian Video Artists speaks volumes in a large beautiful space.
The work is mesmerising, and I consider its theme more closely in relation to my processes and invented borrowed spaces. Contrapositions of strategies and tactics. Strategies of power, and tactics to find a way through, new alternatives, developing innovate ways of working. The powerful and the non powerful…
I chat with a curator. I chat with the security guard about opening times.
I return to the gallery at 7.55pm It is closed.
I like the flat concrete front. The expanse of paved floor in front. Not many people around, but I am not searching for that kind of audience. I sit down and turn the projector on. Distance and space means that the scale of the projection is larger, and this impacts on the experience. I lose edges. Ambiguity and intimacy play with each other here. During the four minute performance, I am only aware of the shadow cast by the security guards peak cap, moving back and forth on the same wall. We watch each other, and nothing is said at all.
Here, aside from the security guard, I have an audience of drivers, moving past or stopping at the traffic lights. Perhaps a viewer from a window in a nearby tower block…
