Runa Islam, born in Bangladesh and brought up in London, has been mediating on the nature of visual media like cinema. She has been exploring its history and aesthetics and investigating the way in which time, space and meaning are manipulated by this visual media. Her first solo in Australia opened at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA)in Sydney on August 19 and will run there until November 21, 2010. Her works were also part of the Asia Pacific Triennial held at the Gallery of Modern Art and Queensland Art Gallery in Brisbane earlier this year.
“Film to me, lends itself as an art form. It is image-based, condenses or stretches time and is a framing device—it has the ability to frame an idea or a concept. Film also has a transformative quality,” Islam said at an artist talk at the MCA on August 20th.
The solo consists of six film-installation works created since 2003 and a related photographic work. The fourth floor of the MCA is transformed into an immersive space where screens are suspended from the ceiling or images are projected onto the gallery walls—and not a digital projector is to be seen. Islam’s works are film-installations—the spinning, whirring old-fashion film projectors are as much part of the artwork as the projected image itself. This use of projectors itself creates the distance between the viewer and the image—you know what you are watching isn’t reality.
The first work you encounter, Assault (2008) is a small, back-lit screen suspended mid-air in a corridor, where a series of bright, changing colours are projected onto an actor’s face—is it a man or a woman? That question is perhaps irrelevant. The actor squints and frowns as the frequency and persistency of the colour shifts intensifies. The film perhaps articulates the assault of the mass media and its saturated images that we encounter everyday.
In Scale (1/16 inch = 1 foot) (2003), two images are projected—one on the back wall, and the second on a smaller suspended screen hung in the middle of the room. Islam uses this literal juxtaposition of images to construct what she calls “a form of architectural wish fulfillment” for an ill-fated concrete building in the provincial English town of Gateshead. Developed as a car park with a rooftop restaurant, the large, concrete building however remained unused. Islam went into the building and filmed three separate narratives—one of the disused building as it stood in reality, one of the original architect model, and a third a temporary restaurant set that Islam created within the building.
“It was an empty shell of a building. So when I was there, I saw it as a persona. I started to imagine what this personality would desire—it would want to be a restaurant. So I call it architectural wish fulfillment,” said Islam.
Soon there were debates about whether this disused building should be listed as a heritage site, or demolished. This dichotomy of notions for the same building is what perplexed Islam. The building is in fact being demolished at the moment.
The 16mm film Be The First To See What You See As You See It (2004), Islam says offers another kind of wish fulfillment. In this large wall-projection, a woman walks into a museum-like space, closely observing the ceramic crockery displayed on plinths. She begins to touch and toy with the artifacts—as many of us are often tempted to do in a museum. Finally, she nonchalantly pushes them off their support, slow motion film capturing their fall and shatter. These shots are interjected by scenes of the woman taking tea and biscuits in another location. “The two different set of images explore the object as it should be used (to drink tea) and as an artifact (on display in a museum),” said Islam.
In Untitled (2008), what at first appears to be a blurred, black-and-white abstract image, can be deciphered as a photograph of a hunting scene only when the camera zooms out to provide context for the image. Here Islam mediates on the framing capacity of film—the filmmaker’s ability to show only what he/she wishes to show.
She takes this concept a step further in her latest work, Magical Consciousness (2010), co-commissioned by the MCA and the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal. The work consists of a large, horizontal wall projection that takes as its subject a Japanese screen from the Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C. The film captures not the highly refined landscape scene painted upon its frontal side but the delicate squares of gold leaf applied to its reverse, which viewers would not normally see. Islam suggests there is much that we ignore, or do not see outside the mainstream discourse of the media. She focuses on the unseen or the hidden aspects of the visual world.
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