![]() ![]() The last work has similar preoccupations, but it uses a very different sort of visual language and certainly is much more sparing with words. is a very, very verbal engagement with that hugely tumultuous moment in history around September 11. Is there a journey between these two pieces? The opening film CNN Concatenated (2002), which viewers see in the ersatz Ausländerbehörde, is a torrent of words, while August (2016) is almost wordless. Omer Fast: 5000 Feet is the Best (2011) 30 minutes, single screen, looped. It’s about allowing visitors to breathe a little bit, and it also has kind of a theatrical dimension and a thematic component that I think is relevant for the work – these are spaces where productive time is suspended, where we feel like we’re frozen in a way and we’re part of a bigger system. Then I came up with the airport and the doctor’s office as two other variations on that theme. While sitting at the Ausländerbehörde, I realised I wanted to reproduce that environment. I didn’t want to show works in seven dark spaces one after the other. What’s the purpose of the “waiting room” installations in the show – the Ausländerbehörde, the airport terminal, and the doctor’s office? But I think it would be reductive to say that it’s a political statement responding to the defence minister. And that’s how the work started, so I guess that’s the political or social connection to it. And I just thought, if it’s not a war, what is it? I thought that by inverting the roles I would look into that statement. The work was triggered by a statement that the defence minister in Germany at the time made about involvement in Afghanistan, which he said was not a war. What is Continuity supposed to suggest to the viewer? Is it a political statement? When they repeat something we understand that it’s part of their lives, and then when they break from that repetition we begin to have a sense of what their spontaneity would be like, what their perversion might be like, and so on. We understand who people are by understanding what their habits are, what their behaviour is like. And I’m interested in repetition in order to explore those roles. I wanted to make something that would initially appear to be a conventional melodramatic family story where all the roles are extremely transparent, and then obscure those roles until you really have to struggle to keep the pieces together, to understand who’s doing what, and why. Once I speak with them I collect material, but I always think about what the conditions for my meeting with them are, and that often leads me to depicting an aspect of the conversation.Īnother technique you use often, and especially in Continuity, is repetition. I often need those conversations in order to generate the work. ![]() I use my work to put me in touch with the lives of others whose work I find interesting. You often employ interviews in your videos. The remaining four are in English and draw on factual footage of people who work in invisible or taboo industries: drone pilots ( 5,000 Feet is the Best, 2011) embalmers ( Looking Pretty for God, 2008) and porn performers ( Everything That Rises Must Converge, 2013).
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