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Indepth Arts News: "Rebecca S.: Video Installation - 808" 2004-09-01 until 2004-10-17 Saint-Gervais - Centre pour l'Image Contemporaine Geneve, , CH
Often in Rebecca S.’s videos, the narrative framework is only suggested; the keys for sorting out the story’s
backdrop are always partial, leaving the way open to an important margin for viewers’ own interpretation.
Indeed, each time we think we have in hand the clue that will lead us through the mystery, or a certain
logic seems to be taking shape, a break, an improbable detail or a false connection once again upsets our
convictions.
The iconographic vocabulary, the atmosphere or the titles of Rebecca S.’s films often point explicitly to the
kind of imagination that is found in fairytales and legends. For example, in De l’autre cote du miroir (From
the Other Side of the Mirror, a direct reference to the Alice books), the artist drags us along for a fruitless
and fearful trot down a forest path. The route chosen forces us to edge our way down the path and brush
up against the sides of a car with open doors and headlights on, and a dead animal lying on the ground
nearby. We are also made to retrace our steps tirelessly, incapable of reaching the refuge-chalet in the distance.
Like Alice in Wonderland, the more we think we are nearing the goal, the more we are actually moving
away from it. In Rebecca S.’s universe, the world is not always what it appears; it may in fact be
unconventional or inverted thanks to a subtle symmetry, as if seen through a mirror.
Thus, hybrid or partly transformed characters people worlds whose realism is noticeably unconventional:
a man-horse (Ou les soleils se levent—Where the Suns Rise), a horse-headed woman (Intime conviction—
Intimate Conviction), a giant spider (Cri de l’araignee—Cry of the Spider), and so on. For the setting of her
latest film, the artist has chosen a long dark labyrinthine hallway with numbered doors (an allusion to the
thriller genre and Stanley Kubrick’s Shining), in which mysterious figures stroll by, pop into the frame and
disappear, conveying a powerful symbolic weight and performing actions that are at times incomprehensible
and enigmatic. And suddenly, unnoticed, at a moment when we are occupied elsewhere, our connection
with reality begins to yield, give way, and a gentle transformation takes place…
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