Moving Image: Performance

Since the invention of the portable video camera nearly thirty years ago, performance and moving-image media have had a natural affinity, due to their shared time-based nature. Moving Image: Performance presents four artworks that investigate this relationship between the video camera and the action it records.

In Kalliope Lemos’s At the Centre of the World the camera is a dynamic witness to the efforts of its subject, a woman seemingly caught in a spherical cage whose movement is an ambiguous mix of struggle and choreography. By contrast, in Roman Signer’s 56 Kleine Helikopter the camera is a static observer of the humorously chaotic action of toy helicopters. In Elena Kovylina’s Equality the camera collaborates in a staged procession of people and props that references questions of inequality in contemporary Russian culture. And in Presence 4 by Universal Everything, the camera recedes while the action becomes purely virtual, as a live dance is translated into a digital abstraction.

This exhibition complements the concurrent installation Rafael Lozano-Hemmer: Wavefunction, Subsculpture 9, which together constitute the second of three presentations at UMMA drawn from the collection of Borusan Contemporary, Istanbul. The works in this year-long trio of exhibitions represent traditional categories such as portraiture, landscape, and performance that find new resonance when explored through the strategies of technology and moving-image media.