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Between time and temporality
In the gallery there are simply projections of images captured by cameras on display. Contrary to the prominent spacial tenor of paintings, sculptures or drawings, these works by Ivan Henriques investigate the limits of our sensorial and intelectual experience of the space by altering or deepening the temporality of the images.
Only the cameras and videos are able to both register and display the images simultaneously. Without corporeity nor density, these images co-exist in the same space eventhough they belong to different times, such ghosts of light electronically leave the body.
Even so, the two works presented, Câmera de monitoramento e Octagron’ present differences between them which begin at the investigation of small deflections of real-time, up to their representation, cristallized as a finished work.
The first of these is born out of the artist’s poetic interference with the real-time flux in the exhibition space. Hence, an in situ intervention, where meaning cannot be disassociated from the physical or institutional nature of the space in which it inscribes itself.
One camera close to the exhibition space entrance staircase, registers the arrival of each visitor into the gallery. These images are deliberately projected to the right of the entrance, with a delay sufficient to enable the visitors to see themselves going up the stairs eventhough they will have already have reached the top. This first projection (video-delay) is captured by the gallery’s own monitoring camera, which in turn, projects in real-time, onto the left wall of the room.
The visitors are invited to view their own sensory experience (since we see by seeing) and therefore become both theme and content from that which would otherwise not be revealed by the space’s own monitoring camera.
Octagron operates by another logic. It is concerned with a finished work which according to the artist is composed of “images previously recorded by 8 cameras around my body which will be transmitted in loop by 8 monitors within a determined circumferance with 2 metres in diameter. The 8 monitors will be facing outwards.”
Here Ivan is the protagonist. Since the public can only see themselves within a minimal oscilation of real-time, in contrast, the artist’s actual body is recorded on video for ever.
His identity unfolds in 8 points of view, exhibited at the external limits of a circle, its comprehension is only possible by the spectator’s trajectory around the work. Therefore, there is here another kind of temporality, and one which depends on the time it takes the visitors to move round this video-istallation.
Time-space, artist/ public become in these works images of images. They appear to evoke the density of time perfectly sinthesized by Michel Faucault’s thought on the relationship between knowledge and reality: ‘every interpretation is an interpretation of an interpretation…”.
FERNANDO COCCHIARALE | INDEPENDENT CURATOR | 2008
photos by Bernardo Brik
