PUBLISHED September 2nd, 2017 03:05 am
Consider the triad of relations between art, its subject, and its audience. Now consider the dynamics that lies within. “It is seeing,” as John Berger writes in his seminal Ways of Seeing, “which establishes our place in the surrounding world”. So our position within this triangular relationship rests, fundamentally, on whether we’re looking, or being looked at. Dries Verhoven’s – a theatre-maker and visual artists from the Netherlands – latest piece for the Singapore International Festival of Arts, Guilty Landscapes III, surfaces this tension in a particularly political context, and consequently probes into the boundaries that lie between us and them.
See our reviews of other Singapore International Festival of Arts 2017 works, including Sonny Liew’s Becoming Graphic and Dragonflies by Pangdemonium.
In the era of live streams, social media, and 24-hour news cycles, images are constantly beamed from all around the world onto the surfaces that we surround ourselves with – images of trifle and banality, yes, but also images of devastation. Given this accessibility, it is easy, thus, for us to aestheticise the ‘other’; for photographers such as Dorothea Lange and Nick Ut to point a camera at them, and have us lament, “Oh, how unfortunate”. But our moral outrage to such misfortune seems almost gratuitous, for what could we possibly know from a mere, static photograph, of the real lives of other people?
Rather than bridging the gap between its viewer and its subject, the photograph, it seems, serves to divide. As Susan Sontag argues, “To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed”. Hence, it is perhaps no coincidence that the four corners of a picture, or a frame, so resemble both a box and a window, insofar as it entraps its subject and puts it up on show. This very objectification is what Verhoeven had often sought to challenge in his art, and what now lies at the essence of his new work.
Entering the installation, you’re greeted first with the familiar white cube of a gallery space. A larger-than-life projection of a war-torn scene lies straight ahead, covering an entire wall, but it is easy to ignore for the more curious objects that exist in the exhibition space with you – a toppled chair and a stand. The text on the latter announces the mediums used in the installation: an overhead projector, internet connection, two chairs, two people. Hold on, there’s only one chair in that space, and you’re the only one here. It is then, and only then, that you begin to notice the uncanny.
The video footage projected before you appears to be produced in real time, and the lone individual in the video looks upon you, through a camera, just as you’d look at him. As he inches, over piles of bricks and debris, closer towards you, your feelings of security begin to crumble. The white wall, which had long separated the both of you, now turns into a portal – a point of connection – and the distant landscape is no longer so distant. It almost exposes you, not just to the pair of eyes on the other end of the camera, but also to the chaos and destruction that lie beyond the screen.
The moment the camera is turned on you, conventional roles in a gallery space begin to change. You’re made uncomfortable by the fact that you’re being watched, and even more disturbed by the experience of how intrusive this gaze is, for have you not looked upon others’ plight in such similar regard? Delving into these psychological complexes, the work pointedly questions our assumptions of the ‘other’, and with it, our performative gestures of guilt and shame. It deconstructs the relative social positions we set ourselves in, and wonders, are we able to unite the ‘us’ and ‘them’ on similar grounds?
Unlike most other pieces, however, this one offers us not just questions, but also an answer. By the end of your ten minutes in the installation, what was once static would’ve become interactive – the avatar on your screen would’ve mimicked your movements, sang to you, and perhaps even smiled at you. Some of the foreignness would’ve melted away, to reveal that within those projected pixels exist neither a victim nor an adversary, but only a human who is just as you are.
As unsettling as this piece may be, you’ll leave the room glad of the work’s upheaval of your preconceived notions. In this climate of crisis and conflict, it seems, such connections and little moments of empathy are precious and much-needed.
Guilty Landscapes III is running from 31 August to 9 September 2017, 3pm – 11pm, at 72-13, Mohamed Sultan Rd, Singapore 239007. For tickets and more information, check out the event page here.