7 September 2008 – 24 May 2009

Follow Fluxus / Emily Wardill Sea Oak / The Diamond (Descartes’ Daughter)

The Nassauischer Kunstverein presents the first Follow Fluxus laureate Emily Wardill (*1977, UK) with her two most recent film installations Sea Oak and The Diamond (Descartes’ Daughter).

“This is a stand-in for Francine, Descartes’ daughter, who never washed up on the shores of Sweden. (…)” with this sentence, a mechanical sounding Swedish accent begins the film The Diamond (Descartes’ Daughter) (2008, 15min). Her words describe the almost entirely black scene projected to the wall in 16mm: A 12year-old girl is playing Nintendo Wii. The only source of light are twitching stroboscope flashes that are reflected by the white stripes on her arms and legs, tracing her movements. The costume she’s wearing is the one that French physiologist, inventor and photographer Étienne-Jules Marey (1830- 1904) had his models wear for his chronophotographic photos that were the first depiction of motion broken down into still images.

From this image onwards, the voice guides us through an interweaved netting of different myths creeping into one another along a chain of associations built up by voice and image.

The scene grows dark. One hears only the narration of an unsuccessful search for a certain scene in a film where a diamond protected by lasers gets stolen by a robotic hand. The film this scene comes from can’t be found : In the speaker’s memory, the images always were different form the real movies: In the „Thomas Crown Affair“1, it’s not a diamond, „Entrapment“2 is too recent, in „Pink Panther“3 the actual theft is missing completely. So a decision is made to shoot the remembered scene. Yet instead of trying to evade the laser grid, the actors on set create it themselves: Trying to keep their hands steady, they reflect one single laser beam around the diamond on a pedestal. It is scenes from this sequence that accompany the voice’s stream of thoughts on the screen.

Address

NKV - Nassauischer Kunstverein e.V.
Wilhelmstrasse 15
65185 Wiesbaden
phone +49 611 30 11 36
http://www.kunstverein-wiesbaden.de/

Opening Hours

Tuesday 2 p.m. - 8 p.m., Wednesday-Friday 2p.m. - 6 p.m., Saturday-Sunday 11 a.m. - 6 p.m., closed on Monday.

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