Twenty Second Hold. His new film draws parallels between public spaces such as the shopping mall and the film or photography studio.
Sarah Dobai’s new film uses a large-scale architectural set depicting a mirrored
passageway situated to one side of the main concourse of a shopping arcade.
Modelled after a decaying development on the outskirts of Paris, the set is stripped
back but its marked surfaces characterise this as heavily used social space. The
passageway is the location for an encounter between the film’s two young
protagonists, becoming a stage for the playing out of scenes of both intimacy and
disengagement.
As with the photographic series Studio/Location Photographs (2008-11), Twenty
Second Hold draws parallels between public spaces such as the shopping mall and
the film or photography studio. Here, like earlier works, Dobai grounds her use of
fiction and narrative in everyday life but also in the self-reflexive conditions of the
production of the work. The film pictures everyday scenarios that are commonly
represented in the cinema. But these scenarios also refer to instances of enactment
that take place in public in which the subject constructs their behaviour with an
audience half in mind. The film is transparent about the status of the protagonists as
models performing fragments of social scenes to camera and in turn to onlookers in
the film studio and to the audience in the gallery.
As its title suggests Twenty Second Hold is structured around the preparation and
performance of a series of durational stills. These static scenarios are not freeze
frames but poses held in real time by the actors for twenty seconds or more. Recalling
the discipline required to pose for the long exposures of early photography or the
theatrical tradition of tableau vivant, we see the actors sway or shift minutely with the
effort of holding their pose.
Interrupting the airless fiction of these enacted stills are short sections of footage
shot between enactments, where the models come out of their poses and rest but
remain on set. The verité quality of this material recorded ‘between takes’ is
juxtaposed with the choreographed static scenarios, reminding the viewer of the film
as the outcome of a studio production.
In the rhythmic interplay between the attenuated frozen time of the performed stills and
fluidity of the unrehearsed footage, Twenty Second Hold reflects on time as the medium of
film and photography. The performed image of a kiss or a look between the two actors
appears to grow in affect the longer the pose is held. In the fixity of the still enactments
actor and viewer alike are drawn into an interior space where time becomes elastic and the
self-conscious nature of public behaviour and the mechanics of image making seem
inseparable.
Credits
The artist would like to thank Emmanuel Akintunde, American Apparel, Elena
Balaska & Karla Otto Ltd, Matt Blake & Kieran Angel, Jay Cole, Daisy Day, Peter
Emery, Keira Greene, Geoff Holloway, Ioanna Karavela, Emily Pelleymounter, Bash
Malik, Stephen Morris, Claire Parsons at Arri Media, Kevin Scully, Jane Steedman,
Stein Stei, Daniel Tonkin, Vision Studios & Eyelights and Nick Wilding.
About Sarah Dobai
Sarah Dobai works with photography, film & video and performance. She has
exhibited widely in the UK, Europe and America. Recent exhibitions include The
London Open, Whitechapel Art Gallery, London; On the Nature of Things, Kamloops
Art Gallery, British Columbia, Canada; Scope: New Photographic Practices, Beijing
University Gallery, Beijing, China; Theatres of the Real, FotoMuseum Antwerp,
Belgium; Darkside II, FotoMuseum Winterthur, Switzerland; Studio/Location
Photographs, WORKS|PROJECTS, Bristol, UK and Sarah Dobai: Photographs &
Filmworks, Kettles Yard, Cambridge, UK.
In 2012 the Whitechapel Gallery commissioned Sarah Dobai to stage a new
performance, Study, as part of The London Open. She is currently developing an
illustrated version of Gogol’s The Overcoat as a Four Corners Books Artist’s
Familiars publication.
Dobai has work in significant public and private collections in the UK, Canada, USA,
France and Belgium including Simmons & Simmons, UK, Vancouver Art Gallery,
Canada and University of Salamanca, Spain.
About WORKS|PROJECTS
WORKS|PROJECTS works with a small stable of distinctive British artists and is
located on Sydney Row in Bristol’s historic harbour side, which has steadily
developed into the centre for visual arts in the city. The gallery is located on the same
block as both Spike Island and Picture This and is only 10 minutes walk from
Arnolfini. The gallery is directed by curator Simon Morrissey.
Image: Twenty Second Hold, Video still
Works|Projects
Sydney Row - Bristol BS1 6UU
Opening times
Thursday – Saturday 12:00 – 18:00 or by appointment
Admission free