AMPUTATION

The camera recording the operation stays still. The screen frames the face of a person who lays on a surgery table, and the folds of the fabric carfully covering the patient. The draperies remind one of the aesthetics of ancient sculptures or renaissance paintings. Colors are dramatically opposed, red and green; the viewer extends the image beyond its visual borders in the mind.

The work represents renouncing. Placed in front of the moving image, the viewer expects a show that something should happen. There seems to be very little happening; the only visible movement is a drop in the intubation tube moving in the same rhythm as the breathing of the patient. From the sounds of the operating room one could reach a conclusion that there is something going on, and the name of the work guides the viewer’s thoughts. Solving the relation between the documentary image and the experienced reality is left to the viewer.

The topic the work explores is not only the facing of one's own corporeality, but also one's relationship with the world; what I want to maintain, what I want to keep for myself, where to mark the boundaries of self, and what the things I don’t want to give away are. And what will happen, if I’m at the point where I have to renounce some of this?

In the video work Amputation, reality is the raw material, giving new relationships and meanings to existing perceptions. The viewer is responsible for creating a new level of reality. The power of the artwork is in the process of mental continuity it creates, in the cycle of associations and states of mind that the viewer experiences.

2006