Following Expand Extract Repent Repeat (2018), carlier | gebauer presents the second solo exhibition by Palestinian-American artist Nida Sinnokrot in Berlin.

At the heart of the exhibition, we find the interactive 16mm film installation When Her Eyes Lifted (2016). It is part of the cinematographic apparatus body of work developed by Sinnokrot, for which the artist coined the term Horizontal Cinema. The installation comprises three modified projectors turned on their side and arranged on a wooden box so as to form a kind of semicircle. This wooden box and the accompanying motor system built from analog and digital components are in turn placed on a carpet in the center of the room. The three-meter-long film reel that runs through all three projectors is thus shown in a horizontal position instead of the usual vertical orientation. This is further emphasized by the visible perforations at the projection’s upper and lower edges. Since the projectors don’t have shutters, each individual frame is frozen within its respective borders—as in Muybridge’s early motion studies, movement emerges in the cumulative progression of individual frames. The film is projected onto three screens arranged separately in the room, which creates an additional layer of fragmentation. The fact that the image we see appears upright—that is, vertical—despite the horizontal projection is due to the fact that Sinnokrot operated the camera at a 90-degree angle during filming. We see a woman pulling on a chain to open a heavy shutter door; the scene is accompanied by the rattling sound produced by the motors and the film reel running through the projectors. Since the playback speed responds through sensors to the movement of the people in the room, the noise can increase to a machine-gun-like staccato—and subside again as soon as the room quiets down. As the film loops and the door—the shutter—is repeatedly opened in a Sisyphean effort, the image before our eyes increasingly disintegrates due to the scratches that develop on the surface of the film stock.