The word “history” came into being, because our events were told and written down thereafter. Now history is being recorded in images or video. Therefore from now on there is no more “History”, but only “Imagery” or “Videory”.
- Nam June Paik, Binghamton Letter(1972)
“We live in an age where truth is constructed from images, not from facts.”
- Simon Fujiwara
As we live in a post-narrative condition, not the end of storytelling but its overflow into new forms. Stories appear between what we choose and what chooses us, across screens and devices, beneath conscious thought.
Through video art, I undertake journeys into the limits of our perception and imagination, triggering images and ideas that, in turn, point towards new realities
and the self-involved thoughts transformed into surreal playgrounds.
It is often said that a document is a record of fact-based information, traditionally in the form of words but more recently also as images such as photographs and moving images. The word “documentary,” meanwhile, has come to be used not only as an adjective meaning “factual” or “consisting of documents,” but also as a noun referring to a film expressing facts.
But my video poems are NOT fact based as much as they deal with the hyper-realities of the mind conjuring their self-destruction and re-assimilation in the real and natural realm. These video poems is are interplay between deliberation and intuition in art practice.
Let's begin first by dissecting and reassessing the unofficial history of imagery as found in sculptures, mosaics and buildings; unfolding those lesser-told layers of its vibrant evolutions until contemporary manifestations. Memories and their counter-memories are fragments upon which I construct visual interpretations not bound by traditional definitions or criteria for artistic representation, but used as a lens that looks at both personal and collective memories.
My video art therefore is a porous network of cultural dialogue and engagements, and it stems from an insane and very profound distrust of imagery, which in turn roused the need for orality and at times textualization of narratives in most of my projects. Through the use of “hijacked” images from popular culture, mainstream movies and publicity materials, the forensic-poetic work is affirmed by inner questions raging from faces of nameless objects and individuals reduced to symbols.
The underlying critical question is what the art can imply for life through suspension of genre-specific boundaries and redefining a new synthesis of the disciplines that explore the collective, the ephemeral, the occasional and yet psychotic engagement with a traumatising world. These video artworks are hence articulated as material testimonies to trauma, using cinema as the language of conflict , to expunge history from corruption.
Video art has always been to express different forms of resistance to dehumanization and interrogate the social fascination with memory erasure and contemplate the conditions of collective amnesia, where the marginalized and nameless, embrace their fluid identities through multiple possibilities of narratives.
This gelatine based pathway into dreams, recognizes the human in the abysmal, the timeless in the archival and the true in the alienated observations of light shed on obscurities. And “Human" here, is etymologically related to the word "humus," which is soil.
This cinematic art is far from representational or unambiguous. There are always ‘tipping points’, ambiguities and multiple meanings, less concerned with a concrete reproduction of reality than with “interpreting existence”, sometimes utilizing technical glitches as tools, and rewriting visual narrative paths in atypical ways.
Rather than follow predetermined paths, video art moves across shifting contours, layered fictions and shifting realities, lead us down unanticipated paths.
These appropriated manipulated images subjected to a series of physical alterations and even macabre that they portray, they have been penetrating deeper into the unconscious of technological society
Blending storytelling with critical and dissenting narratives, the video work subverts the polarising structures shaping our understanding of the world, and, explores the anxieties provoked by the uncertainties and social injustices of our time.
By examining the perpetuation of systems of classification through the continuation of colonial tropes in cataloguing and conserving historical events through various media, evoking a metaphorical resonance between land privatization histories and the process of memory.
Video Art therefore embraces incompletion as a generative method for pushing inherited fragments and unresolved ideas into motion, juggling a paradoxical dynamic of gazing while being gazed at, offering sensorial testimony to the historical traumas, and the fragile and illusory nature of social systems we live in.
Within a contemporary visual climate in which images appear to precede reality, an era where reality is thought to be the outcome of images rather than images being an outcome of reality, how do archival images lay claim to representing truth?
And as modernity’s separation of the mind from the body is damaging to ourselves and the planet is apparent, how will technological modes of recording reality alter our recollections of reality?
Video art therefore embraces glitches and errors that are treated not as failures but as methods. They create cracks where new meanings slip through, moments where the story branches unexpectedly into fault lines point to the politics of narrative: who gets to tell the story, who is written in, and what is left unsaid.
Interweaving the personal and the collective, in other words, a holistic unfolding of memories and socio-cultural associations., video art is a contingent process of creating meaning of identity and collective biography.
Video art practice includes appropriating museum collection audio-visually and representing them in a new formulaic symbolism, allows for an ethical approach to retracing the traces of various voices and images that have been constructed and erased throughout history, bringing the repressed and overlooked to the forefront, inscribing them into the local context, thus opening a dialogue between time, place and history.
The archival artefacts alluded to include sound-based and silent works, yet within which sound is always present—sometimes heard, sometimes only imagined - yet retaining and relating to the partially obscured histories of human reality.
The resultant visual experiments recreate visual narratives that draw on stories that resonate with the current resurgence of discourse about archival truisms and heritage preservation. Furthermore they employ montage to juxtapose appropriated images, generating new meanings, offering a careful reflection on appropriation and collaboration, foregrounding the artist’s role as art historian, documentarist, and archivist.
This archives-based video art practice therefore operates at the intersection of cinema and historical research of heritage of absurd histories and rituals as varied as cinema screenings, psychoanalytic sessions, and experimental theatrical performances are model for exhibitions: they are mediated experiences by which to access worlds beyond the everyday and connects these emancipatory practices to anti-colonial and anti-capitalist movements in the present.
Video art becomes the ever more refined messenger for a modern world that might be seen beyond appearances, it announces new orders of vision, it gives the future something more than an image, embracing the idea that everything we think we know is, to some degree, a constructed narrative.
