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video installation
Soundtrack : Aernoudt Jacobs
'And God saw the light , that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.' Genesis 1:4
Alexandra Dementieva's video installation “Minimal Reality” forces viewers to question what reality is, what is they really seeing?
She makes a viewer question the physiology and psychology behind a sensorial process, in which the brain is engage trying to register and decode a stream of visual information.
By deliberate reduction of the visual stimuli to contrasting black and white images in multi-channeled video projected simultaneously on several screens, the installation evokes the environment of psychological experiments of perceptual isolation.
The Minimal Reality can be seen as an illustration to Genesis: the beginning of the beginning, the light and darkness. Starting from a cosmic black “void” , the video proceeds slow in the course of minutely detailed imagery, one notices light dots, a birth of stars? One will never know. Nevertheless, he video holds us in suspense, the ambiguous shapes evolves, transforms into the shadows, only to disappear unto emptiness, wiped out by the same light that brought them into existence.
The video blurred imagery brings to mind black and white painting of Gerhard Richter, his photographic abstractions, where the negative and positive are blurred as much as the original images. Similarly to him Dementieva pushes the audience to pay close attention to the process of watching, that refers one back to the very act of seeing.
MS
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