Art Yesterday I had the pleasure of strolling down to Greenland Street for the Bloomberg New Contemporaries 2006. As with the previous exhibition, there are some hidden gems, but two pieces in particular have stuck in my memory.
In Joshua Balgos's very effective video work Cigarettes (2005), an audio recording of a conversation between a shop clerk and a man buying cigarettes ensues over an ever changing collage showing snatches of the same photograph of a beautiful white house.
As what should be a simple transaction gains a depth that neither parties seems to want, accompanying subtitles intimate the double meaning of the actual thoughts behind their words; its the famous scene from Woody Allen's Annie Hall replayed without the benefits of the characters faces and (here's the twist) from a racial perspective.
Kiran Kaur Dra's Passport Lahloh (2004) the video recording of a performance piece in which a girl sits at the side of the road with an upturned box covered in passports. An interested crowd gathers and it slowly becomes apparent that not all is as it seems.
What's brilliant about these pieces is that they're both accessible and yet rely upon the viewer to assimilate the method of representation very quickly before presenting a startling twist which leads them to watch again so that they can savour the moment again with a new perspective, a trick seen in innumerable feature films, but achieved here in around two minutes. Amazing.
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