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3/11/2004

Gina Tornatore

House of Lords of Kunstat, Brno

Catch

The main objective of the underground video-floor at the House of Lords of Kunstat is to allow the visitors intense and undisturbed contact with one or two films. As a matter of fact, you may usually meet video in the context of other media or in exhibitions confronting more authors, which makes it difficult to take in individual experiences. At the same time, it is particularly video – usually the outcome of a long preparation and an intense message concentrated into several minutes – which offers you a world that has first to be settled in.

Following the presentations of Spanish artist Jorge Peris and Czech author Milena Dopitova, the underground video-floor now brings two films by Gina Tornatore (*1969 GB/Australia), born in Australia, but working in London since the time of her studies.
Gina Tornatore considers her works first of all as films. And indeed, her “videos” are characterised with a great deal of stylisation, they evidently originated according to a thought-out screenplay, their editing composition is solidly structured and musical support carefully chosen – unless the author works with the absence of a soundtrack. The film “plot” is usually linear, beginning with a sudden action, going on through a study of its course till the climax, usually unequivocal or (as in the case of the work Outer and Inner Actions) doubled in its “unequivocalness”. On the other hand, Gina Tornatore’s films approach experimental studies of human behaviour and gestures (perceived sub specie their cultural and social conditioning) in strenuous situations. In a certain sense, these films may be perceived as combination of a story and a behavioural sketch. Another important level of the films consists in the elaborated choreography, determining motions, gestures and conduct of the actors. Nevertheless, dance as a complex body language of signs, or purely expressive, is not the basis of the films, but one of their reference frames. By means of allusion to dance choreography, the spectator develops a new relation to the meanings of gestures and motions in various situations, which he/she otherwise would perceive subliminally and decipher intuitively. The author’s work with time, its slowing, bringing it back or circulating, has to do with that as well. The transformation from the real time of action to the “deformed” time of projection makes it possible for the spectator to re-evaluate standpoints on the seen and imagined action/story (Catch – struggle and roll) and on the reactions to it. The basic instincts and extremes in conduct which, however forgotten with relief, make an invisible framework of everyday life, are again brought into play in Gina Tornatore’s films – although not as a shock unexpectedly shaking the body, but as a reflexive structure, helping to understand one’s social body and its physical reactions.

Besides the immediately identifiable context in the domain of fiction and play, Gina Tornatore’s films, thanks to sensitive allusions, paradoxically tend towards early film (remember the recordings of hysterical fits or black-and-white slapsticks), but also to such film-makers like Tarkovsky or Bresson. It is the movement between pop-culture and “elite films”, between theatre action and film definitive, between the literary character and a direct hit that makes the reticent, personal imperativeness of these works, which for me becomes an ever more important quality in the encounter with a work of art.
Marek Pokorny

Curator: Marek Pokorny

Media Partners: Tyden, Umelec, Springerin

4 November – 14 December 2003
10 am – 6 pm, closed on Mondays

Gina Tornatore:
Catch (struggle and roll), 2002
16mm colour film transferred on DVD, soundless
15.5 minutes

Gina Tornatore:
Outer and Inner Actions, 2003
Digital colour video with sound
DVD-PAL
4 minutes

House of Lords of Kunstat / Brno House of Arts
Dominikanska 9, CZ-602 00 Brno

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