- Venue
- DCA (Dundee Contemporary Arts)
- Location
- Scotland
Boris Gerrets’ 3 Films questions the continuing obsolete taxonimising of the arts and its mediums in the 21st century. His works are neither documentary film-making nor video art. This is not the crux of his pieces, however, which feature strangers and alien landscapes, whereby the viewer is engrossed in strands of foreign existence.
Gerrets is not afraid of his medium, the principal film being People I Could Have Been and Maybe Am (2010), recorded entirely on his mobile phone camera. Pixelated, jerky footage captures moments of delicacy, imperfection and intimacy of the two protagonists, whose lives never intertwine but become central to Gerrets’ film, subsequent success and personal life. It was chance encounters, initiated by Gerrets, which leads to an unfolding surreally pensive reality of inner-city living in the UK.
Invisible (1995) identifies exactly what Gerrets is not – Invisible. He, like the majority of others, becomes affected by the lives of those around him, unable to stay in an outsider neutral position. However, authorship and legitimacy, prevalently grey areas in both visual arts and media, strike the viewer in both Invisible and People I Could Have Been and Maybe Am. Both are very different films in location and style, but both are essentially “weaving the web of reality”. Invisible portrays his own philosophising on his time spent in Iraq, through Gerrets’ spoken writings, in which he voices his understanding of daily survival living under a dictatorship. Poetically expressing “the undercurrent can take you away…” , and resonating not only with the oppression documented through his words in Invisible, but also applicable to People I Could Have Been and Maybe Am. In the latter, the audience is introduced to Steve, through Gerrets’ typed words, ambiguously explaining that “he fell out the system a long time ago”, a system that Steve states as invisible, a secondary differing bureaucratic undercurrent. Steve appears to be a typical down-and-out character – battling previous addiction, replacing one addiction with a new, and witnessing the disastrous aftermath this has on relations. Steve has no control of his life, acting as antithesis to Sandrine, a self-aware beauty seeking a better life for her and her son left behind in Brazil. Instantly the viewer is seduced by the unusual egoistic qualities of Sandrine and is conscious of Gerrets’ captivation. Sandrine and Gerrets predictably become more deeply involved, yet she continues to string along a host of potential husbands. It may be predictable, yet the blatancy of documenting this and Sandrine’s compliance initiates uncomfortable queries about exploitation, or perhaps the need to be needed within the human psyche.
At times Gerrets becomes forgettable in these films, as the viewer becomes focused upon piecing together and comprehending the lives of others. Zero (1997) presents various rotating, uninhabited landscapes, and speaks of anonymity, more so than either of the other two films. It is a work that independent of the others, appears to be more standard “video art”; however there is an eerie reverberation from the piece. The gallery partitioned creating two spaces; whether intentional or not, these films become connected by this reverberation. Worlds collide as overtones from the other two films (and vice-versa) echo from the adjacent space, impacting on the soothing changing natural beauty of Zero, permitting contemplation of the uncertainty of life’s passage.
