CCA, Glasgow until
October 13th
Four stars
Grace Schwindt turns things
inside out in her new video installation, which flits its way across five
screens arranged in a circle as a group therapy session might be. Onscreen,
four figures stand, sit or dance in a field beside five similar screens. One
woman looks dressed for mourning, occasionally invoking lines from what might
be a eulogy or prayer, or else hanging up a piece of black material as a false
window. Another woman throws shapes, while a horse stands as passively as the
old man in a chair who says nothing in a way that nevertheless speaks volumes
as much as his trumpet playing does.
Is this Heaven? Given
the film’s roots in the work of 1970s radical German anti-psychiatrity group The
Socialists Patients Collective (SPK), probably not, though in its portrait of a
world conjured up by an old man’s memory that takes a leap beyond the clinical
confines of a medical institution, it could be. With the film’s title and
script drawn from conversations between Schwindt and her grand-father, there is
a haunting personal element to the thirty-nine-minute construction, with
assorted images and associations akin to the dreamscapes of Rene Magritte and
other surrealist works that have broken through the canvas.
What emerges in a piece
filmed at Cove Park artists residential centre is a tender and slow-burning
elegy to a life of wisdom and experience that translates into a pre-death
ritual homage to the power of the imagination that sired it. When one of the
five screens falls towards the film’s end shortly after the piece of black
cloth has been unpicked, whether by accident or design, it opens out an even bigger
window to a world in which lives are never really still, but are creating
landscapes you can only dream of.
The List, September 2019.
ends
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