KVT – Video Screening at L’Espace

What great stuff……. but if only!!

L’Espace has a wonderful selection of French video art on show in their foyer/art space. I stayed for an hour but could have stayed for much longer. I started off with Mathieu Rouget’s ‘For Mother’. It’s a deceptively simple but extremely powerful 3 minute piece on the horror of war, and displacement, violence, revenge, and despair, and video war games and………

Then I couldn’t get enough of Chouvellon’s ‘Vague Ground’ where white plastic has been spread over a vast area and swells and ripples in the breeze.

Can’t say I loved them all and my favorites would, of course, be consigned to the bottom of the dust bin of taste by another discerning viewer.

Now the If Onlies
I O…………there was a suitable space to adequately show these fascinating bits and pieces. A space where the video screens could be spaced far enough apart so that viewing was not compromised and so that if a sound track was part of the presentation you could take it in, in context.

I O……..there was seating available at each screen so that you could enjoy them in their entirety (from 3minutes to 2 hours – not that you’d need the whole 120 minutes to totally relate to Bougadier’s ‘Call of Duty’ – but at least a mesmerizing fifteen is my recommendation.

I O………the screens were larger…..sometimes huge would be scintillating and in discrete walled spaces. Once you see the works such as ‘Terrain Vagues’, ‘High Latency’ and the unpronounceable ‘Interlichtengespenterin’ you’ll understand why. And oh what I’d give for a sprawl on the floor of a blacked out room to really enjoy a big screen version of ‘Chambre’ in which a patch of intricately patterned, Victorian era wallpaper fascinatingly morphs and evolves. Almost took me back to my childhood holidays on Grannie’s farm when we’d go to bed by lamplight and watch flickering shadows play mysterious games and tell everchanging tales over the water stained walls.

But the If Onlies are not a fault of L’Espace or the curator as the available area is used as well as possible and it’s all well worth a visit or two… in fact highly recommended.

One video by Veronique Boudier, ‘Night and Day’ will be shown on the big screen in the main auditorium on April1, 2, and 8 at 5 and 8. Should be a great experience.

I really like spending time with good video installations and, for me, these are! I’ll be back a couple more times soon ….have to grab some tickets to that chanteuse incroyable, Mouron, who sings on April 20. Last year she was totally incroyable.