_Born 1962
in Tampere, Finland,
_Lives in Helsinki
Giants,
1998
16 mm film transferred to DVD (color, sound), 60' loop
view a sequence 1900 KB
Mika Hanula
(..) Giants is actually a third part of an unplanned trilogy of video
works, which are all focused on different close-ups of people fighting.
Despite the same starting point, works that have evolved between 1993
and 1998, they are by their character tellingly different. Whereas in
the first work, she was boxing and getting literally smashed by a male
boxer, the two later ones project a much more even and balanced physically
aggressive relationship between two women. The steps leading from the
highly personal and tragical misery into realms of very nuanced articulations
of the various aspects of violence of everyday physical contacts are quite
astonishing.
The scene of the Giants (1998), shot on 16-mm film but showed as a loop
of a large video projection of circa 2.5 x 4.5 meters, is both unfamiliar
and familiar. It is an explicitly non-place, but a site which in its anonymity
is recognised very easily. Standing on the rocks of a tiny uninhabited
island outside of Helsinki, there are two women wrestling and hitting
one another.
The most curious aspect of the act is its disturbing timelessness. The
video shapes a physical presence for itself, not unlike the three-dimensional
substance of traditional sculptures – a direct reference to her background
as a student beginning with sculptures. Besides the stressed non-linearity
and open-ended structure of the narrative, she has achieved the effect
with a delicate and dangerous but successful technical trick. The pictures
of fighting women, their gruffed sounds and the ubiquitous waves of the
sea are all in slow motion.
The result is the age-old but lucrative strategy of flirting with fiction
and reality: alienation. (..)
Please also
visit the archive of Basis-Wien at
http://www.basis-wien.at
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