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27/11/2008

Annika Larsson

Cosmic Galerie, Paris

One of the most renowned video artists of her generation, Annika LARSSON has pioneered since her first works at the end of the 90's an innovating style and singular themes, which she keeps exploring in her most recent pieces. Her videos only stage men, engaging in actions that are usually associated with the masculine sphere of which they explore the symbolic language, be it the relationship to rules and the different forms of control or the codes and expressions of power, submission and violence.

For her third show at COSMIC GALERIE, Annika LARSSON presents her new video, Dolls (2008, 47 min.), that deepens in a rigorous way her reflection on the position of the spectator facing artificial situations and their various layers of mediation.

Dolls is a video in three parts, all taking place in the same closed space, an artificial playground where three male characters act and move successively. The setting is itself a full-fledged character, between the contemporary art "white cube" , a theatre stage and a videogame set, with its obstacles and possibilities for action. The coloured signs painted on the walls and the objects all recall representations of a history of abstract, minimal and ready-made art, and video games direction signs.

This multiple aesthetics is diverted by the presence of the five protagonists, puppets entirely devoted to the mechanical accomplishment of daily tasks with no further meaning than their instant realisation. Serving coffee, buttoning a jacket or brandishing a sledge-hammer, the men that are filmed by Annika LARSSON in a both seducing and frightening slow motion do their duty with the impassibility of machines. The banality of their appearance, their uniforms and their costumes is yet disordered by little details (ski boots, knotted ties around their arm etc.) as incongruous as the pink fluorescent bonnet used by the artist in Pink Ball (2002). The supposed professional skills and social function of these men, notably symbolized by their uniforms, seem to have lost their meaning, just like the objects they are activating.

Annika LARSSON's videos deal less with the relations between men and women and a potential feminist comment than with the place and the role of man in a society that is entirely devoted to work and the production of goods, of which they enlighten the absurdity and illegibility of rules and codes. The precision of the framing, the playing on close-ups and slow-motions all contribute to a derealizing effect. So does the soundtrack written by the New York electronic musician Sean McBRIDE, which reinforces the dramatic tension of the coldish images.

The banality of the rituals that are suspended in the slowed time of the video almost evokes a defective version of a reality-TV show, as if the machinery of the continuous spectacle that is given to see in our society of hyper-media was jammed.

Cosmic Galerie
7-9, rue de l'Equerre 33 - Paris
Wednesday to Saturday, 2 pm to 7 pm
Free admission

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