In the (Well-Lit) Laboratory of Life, Death, and Dreams: SARCOPHAGUS, Ghanaian Style, or the Funeral of a Dreamer
Carrie Roseland
The lights in the two rooms are off. Light filters in from the main gallery and music can be detected in the background, but that doesn’t lessen the feeling that I’ve entered another world–a laboratory of light, video, mechanical objects, and assemblage. But this project is not about the ways in which technology creates alienation. In this laboratory technology is introduced to human ritual: burial. The six artists, whose works comprise the exhibit "Sarcophagus," have taken as inspiration and common starting point the Ghanaian idea that "death is by no means a mournful event, but a logical completion of one’s life’s journey."
Curator Anna Frants’ own 2003 video-mechanical sculpture, the work that provided the show’s title, consists of a white sphere suspended at eye level about a foot from the wall, to which a small pair of wings is attached. Underneath is a cluster of long candles; for as long as the wicks burn, the wings will beat intensely, producing a mechanical sound recalling that of a 16mm projector.
A short, looped video is projected onto the wall behind the sphere. Images appear as in dreams: an eye opening; fish swimming; a man in a tree, chopping; views of the city; streetcars; an elderly person in a room; and finally the eye again. And it emits sounds: the recognizable tones of the urban environment, the rhythmic ringing of a bell. Such repetitive ringing could provoke insanity, but here it has the soothing quality of a familiar rhythm, which, without heraldry, announces that everything continues as usual. The dialogue of video and mechanical sculpture creates a work that portrays desire and struggle, endings and continuation.
In another corner stands Marsha Baturina’s Columbarium (Latin for a shelter for birds, particularly pigeons), a case containing a black floral-print dress surrounded by a set of lightboxes that illuminate photos of discolored synthetic flowers in cemeteries, signs in Latin from botanical gardens, numbered stone markers, and public transport tickets. This juxtaposition of images echoes the exhibition theme with poetic simplicity and potency.
In Columbarium, the presence of power cords adds to the laboratory-like ambiance. This mood is intensified by Alexy’s Troubetskov’s installation The Doctor–a wild, doctor-assemblage over which energetic figural drawings hang–and Andrey Bartenev’s Sarcophagus of Intergalactic Wind–a bright green, self-lit alien lying on a table, accompanied by the sound and video of a previous performance.
