SMOKE IS GETTING INTO MY EYES_______2′ 44″ min single channel video projection / 2017

 

 

 

Video projection SMOKE IS GETTING INTO MY EYES is a memory journey of a one woman during her one sigarette smoke. In SMOKE IS GETTING INTO MY EYES ( from INTO THE DARKNESS Series ) slide film materials are scanned mechanically overlapping each other, layer by layer, while sometimes image is almost gone. What before was a linearly formatted story, where each still horizontally follows one another, became a Vertical Story / Vertical Movie with each still stacked on top of each other.

 

Figurative elements are slowly squeezed out of each still and eventually turn into a abstraction. Photo-transparencies are loosing parts of their original story adhesion so the meanings, like the memory itself deteriorates over time. Although as well as in our memory those “unrecognisable” areas are not just a blank/black spots. As we witnessed the transformation from figurative to abstract, we know that images are there; that’s what actually makes those areas dark — it’s being full of images/memories. My interest lays mostly in not what we see but in what we don’t see — what left in folds and wrinkles.

 

The work evokes the famous “Proustian moment”, the madeleine cookie effect described by Marcel Proust’s in his Remembrance of Things Past. The layered image become visual evidence of the moment not just what is perceived, but also how and what is remembered. It is a symbolic reflection of repeated and constant links between perception and memory with its fragmentation / blank spaces /thresholds, its forgotten and coming back to life moments.