Date: 08.02.2016 — 06.03.2016
Beginning: 19:00
Warning: Text – leaflet – read only after seeing the whole installation!
Source material on which Alžběta Bačíková based the creation of her installation are downloaded videos. Their author is a man from the Czech Republic, who thus recorded his daily life. These records serve as evidence of people´s activity, who he mostly calls doctors, who systematically and persistently try to harm his health and dominate his entire life (they poison food, they affect his health during the night). They are often used as motivating shots, declamation of readiness to fight Physicians (opening knives, kontrol of the flat, lubricating lard on the windowsill).
The paranoid stores these video files on public server ulozto.cz and does not hide them from other users: they are therefore particularly with regard to its amount, paradoxical and extremely detailed insight into the personal life that he tries to protect so much against foreign and sinister outside forces. To all those files he assigns long names that describe what is happening in them (according him), or of what are these video files evidence. These names have almost literary character of absurd poems, proclamations or perhaps unconscious and litanies.
Longwinded titles are recorded by professional actor and there was also created a soundtrack by noise musicians, increasing the urgency of the picture using various noises and rustles. This whole process was recorded and parts of the record are simultaneously screened in three-channel installation. We feel that we are witnessing a large (double, triple,..) image manipulation, narrative default files, the overall atmosphere and context of the original records of the paranoid. In addition, all the “tricks” of the medium of film are admitted, literally exposed to our eyes, and the complex world of the moving image is painfully transparent.
In the era of the modern man, from the beginning of the nineteenth century, we find countless examples that attempt to evoke or even the result of a fragmented inner world of paranoid or schizophrenic. However, in the case of Alžběta’s work, we are witnessing almost academic (in the best sense – instructed) deconstruction of that vision. Due to the increase of the spectacular record probing of the boundaries permeability media – alienated not only files, but also our own vision. We are witnessing, as in previous Alžběta´s videos, gentle handling of environmental influences, formed through the merger of unexpected reality to a new interpretative framework.
Alžběta points out that the publicly accessible video becomes public property when it is shared on publicly accessible server. Yet to my mind creeps the issue of moral aspect of the entire project. Who is this man? Do we not look at the desperate plea for help? Don´t we look at plodded man destroyed by imperfect social security system, or just the oddball that after the collision with the “reality of life” seeks enemies in his vicinity? When I saw the starting material for the first time, I remembered the Hollywood movie Conspiracy Theory from 1997, in which the main character (Mel Gibson) is suffering a similar paranoia as our “protagonist”. It turns out that his vision of reality have real substance and he is really watched by people (government program), the hero is given some legal capacity and is more humanized, is admitted to the circle of “normal” people. It occurs to me much crazier idea that this person (paranoid) plays with the audience his own game, that he is fully authorized and plays to his potential audience the game of incapacitated person. That would get all the Alžběta´s work totally different context and the camera’s eye would lie even more than before.
Curator: Martin Prudil
