Along with Erik Schmidt’s solo exhibition and the first presentation of works by our new gallery artist, Tomasz Kowalski, Marcellvs L.’s most recent video installation is a special highlight that we will be showing in the video room to celebrate the Gallery Weekend and the opening of our new space on Markgrafenstrasse. At this new location the gallery programme will continue to focus on video and film installations, which will become firmly anchored in the gallery’s activities with the creation of a cinematheque.
The title of Marcellvs L.’s video installation consists of the geographical coordinates of the place where the images emerged. Five parallel screens show five views of corridors that are intersected by passageways. The cameras point in the same direction, but from five different fixed positions, show the corridors’ own axial symmetry. The views are disrupted at random intervals by people crossing and wandering through the corridors, shifting in scale because of the different camera’s positions. This activity does not follow any recognizable rhythm or pattern. The view of the place becomes an irritating abstraction, as suggested by the work’s title. The geographical data are just as precise as they are abstract, while the symmetry of the place restricts human movement to two dimensions: the people cross the camera’s field horizontally or they move about in the depths of the space. The formal consistency of the presentation is further broken on two temporal levels: the videos were recorded over a six months period, yet at different intervals. Furthermore, the different lengths of each video, from 8 to 40 min, result in overlapping within their duration.
In his work, Marcellvs L. creates a place that appears to exist solely in the present, but which cannot be situated in reality.