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The
Visitor
Single channel
video with sound, 15' 58" (2007)
The Visitor is a photo-essay of the
artist’s
audience with Oba Erediauwa, the current king of
Benin. A local narrator follows
the artist into the Oba’s palace and recounts
the conversation between the European visitor and
the royal host and his court of chiefs. The exchange
centers on the Benin Bronzes (famously
looted by the British in 1897 and now in over
500 museums and collections worldwide), collective
memory and the demand for restitution. However, communication
remains somewhat elusive, slipping in and out of
gaps of cultural and historical difference.
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Lost
Wax
7-channel video
installation with sound
(2007)
Lost Wax shows artists at work in the
traditional brass-casting district in Benin City
(Nigeria), using the ancient
lost wax technique (cire perdue) and recycled metal
from the West. The visual and auditory constellation
of the spread-out monitors mirrors the shared labour
and the simultaneity of different processes and stages
of production.
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Worldwide
Benin
Single channel
video and wall drawing (2007)
A roll call of over 500 museums and
collectors - from the British Museum to André Breton
- holding the Benin artifcats taken by the British
in 1897. A wall drawing represents a map of the world
drawn by connecting these collections with each other.
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A
Very Fine Cast (110 years)
28 line-block
engravings on Somerset textured paper (2007)
"By privileging the linguistic over
the visual, a subversive archive is built up which
substitutes
the traditional objects of the museum archive - the
physical artefacts – for their verbal descriptions
which unintentionally (on the part of the authors)
catalogue the racist and colonial narratives that
surround the Benin Bronzes into the present. Fixed
and frozen by the printing process, these texts are
produced from linguistic negative casts in the form
of the metal engraving plates which, quite literally,
set into relief the darker, historical context and
frame for the museum collections." Gilane Tawadros
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The
Naked Palace
Single channel
video with sound, 15' 58"(2007)
The camera trails a guide on a tour
through the labyrinthine architectural complex of
Ogiamen’s palace in Benin City (Nigeria). This
extraordinary building was constructed in the 12th
century and is one of only a handful of houses that
survived the British punitive expedition of 1897.
Ogiamen’s family inhabits it to this day. As
the camera follows the guide’s navigation of
the ancient palace and records his explanations,
the image oscillates between jerky disorientation
and lingering close-up shots of architectural details
and textures. The portrait of the palace remains
fragmentary and ruptures between seeing and understanding,
between a historical imaginary and the contemporary
conditions become palpable.
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Descent
Single channel
video with sound, 6' (2006)
In Descent an Israeli woman in the
last stages of pregnancy talks about her experience
of moving to Switzerland. The video takes its title
from the literal translation of a Hebrew expression
for emigration from Israel: Yerida. Descent presents
fragments from what appears to have been a longer
conversation. Imagination, projection and reflection
inhabit the gaps of speech and evoke the ghosts of
place, history and politics.
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Time
Pieces
AudioWork,
8' (2006)
Time Pieces is a sound-work made for
the Sir John Soane Museum Audioguide Project, curated
by Carmen Cebreros and Claudia Rodríguez-Ponga.
It explores actual and metaphorical time-pieces of
the famous Sir John Soane Museum creating connections
between the cyclical time of clocks and the seasons
and the historical time of the world we live in.
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Everything
in Red, Yellow, Blue and Green
Single Channel
Video, 63' 40" (2006)
Everything... explores notions
of collecting and ownership in the era of eBay; the
ready-made, latter-day Wunderkammer, the everyman’s
haven of all things collectible, the never-ending,
worldwide back-yard auction. Everything... is
a cabinet of contemporary curiosities each of which
represents one of the main eBay categories - a slide
show organised according to the four eBay colours
and accompanied on another screen by the endless
scroll of the entire eBay repertory of categories.
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Midday/Midnight
(66° 33')
Single / two
channel video, 1 minute looped (2006)
"Uriel Orlow
has created a beautiful and poetic installation
[…]. His Midday/Midnight (66° 33') conists
of a two-screen video showing a car journey across
a bridge in the arctic at midday and midnight,
both filmed on the longest and the shortest day
of the year. The result is a time-space confusion
caused by the presence or absence of light." Rikke
Hansen, Art
Monthly, issue 298 (July-August, 2006)
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