One Way Street
ONE WAY STREET
KX Hamburg
2007
Video works by: Amanda Beech, Pierre Bismuth, Jaspar Joseph Lester, Roman
Vasseur
Curated by: Amanda Beech, Jaspar Joseph Lester, & Matthew Pool
This exhibition explores how particular video works take on the authority that we have understood to be the domain of architecture, in that they produce a sense of the common, the public and sociality, but also how they take up and reconfigure public and communal space in physical terms in the gallery environment.
Taking these two related aspects as its foundation, the curation of this exhibition aims to think through video as a facet of architecture. To achieve this, the four video works are presented within specially designed structures of suspended screens that fragment the space of the gallery, both disrupting and directing views and movements through the space.
The title of the show takes its cue from Walter Benjamin’s text
of the same name. Benjamin’s text intermingles a series of disjointed
narrative spaces, scenarios, theories and memories that effectively collapse
the monumental, ideological space of architecture and the spectacle of
cinema. Architecture is now temporal and unfixed from time; a set of cinematic
fictional encounters, and fleeting ‘cinematic’ images become
dark spectral scenes that loom as monuments. Within this world of phantasmagoria
the site for experiencing what we determine to be ‘reality’
is constituted by violence, power and pleasure.
The video works in the exhibition extend this experience of narrative
and space through establishing themselves as ‘real fictions’.
They take on sensorial and forceful qualities, moving us to agreement,
immersing us, and producing what we understand to be our commonality.
As a total domain of experience, the exhibition draws upon the notions
of cinematic space as an architectural field and explores how our social
lives can be understood as a cinematic territory.