Julia Loktev's work is grounded in film-making. Her 16mm
films, video/audio works and installations mix reality and fiction and highlight the
transitory nature of the urban experience. Said in Passing (2000) is a
large-scale, 5-channel video installation that combines elements of documentary and
performance. The work stages the possibility of experiencing other people's identities in
a crowded subway environment. The audience sits down, dons headphones and listens to short
statements made by characters in the projection before them. The result is an articulation
of a fragmented identity that is inconsistent and unreliable: a blurring of self and
character, a performance of self as character. Loktev (b. 1969, Russia) lives and works in
New York.
A solo show of her installation work was organized by The Edge, Denver, in 1993. Moment of
Impact (1998, 16 mm film), has been featured at various film festivals round the world and
received several international awards. Audio works have been broadcast by radio stations
and presented in group shows including "Hearing is Believing" at the Irish
Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (1993).
“The subway, a public space with no specific place. Buried beneath the urban
grid, the subway is neither here nor there. It is the city in motion, the city becoming,
the city on the run -- a constantly shifting no man's land, in a perpetual state of
carrying the periphery towards the center and the center out towards the periphery. For
15-30 minutes at a time, passengers of completely different races, cultural backgrounds,
economic classes and sexual orientations stand and sit next to each other, physically
touching people they will never meet. In the city, public space becomes a transition
rather than a destination. You don't go to a public space, you go through a public space.
Five video projections form a long image in a narrow room. In each projection, a woman
rides the New York subway for an uninterrupted 15-20 minutes. She has been cast for the
role, though she's not necessarily an actress. Over the course of each ride, the
passengers on the side change, but the woman remains. You don't know where she's coming
from and you don't know where she's going. You are seeing a fragment, a long take from a
movie you're never going to see the rest of -- a film still in action. The women were
instructed not to read, listen to a Walkman or sleep; they could not focus on any activity
which would enclose and isolate them, which would allow them to disengage from the public
space of the subway and turn it into a private space. They were asked simply to wait out
the time between departure and destination. The subway translates space into time, time
waiting between here and there. Public space becomes public time.
The city is built on the promise of the random
encounter, or is it just the fantasy of the random encounter? For the most part, you
settle for random adjacencies; you substitute proximity for interaction. But here in this
train to nowhere, here maybe you have a chance. Here among the projections maybe you can
find someone to project your desires onto, someone to satisfy your curiosity, someone to
pass all that time with. Out of this public, you choose a person. Put on the headphones
across from each projection and you get the woman's voice. This is not an interior
monologue; the voice is aimed at an audience. The woman tries to present herself through a
fragmentary list of attributes, dispensed like trading cards, each no more important than
the next -- intimate information is transformed into a kind of quantifiable commodity. The
women composed their own statements in response to several hundred questions. Of course,
as in any interview, they could always bend the truth, blur the line between the self and
the self desired, between self and character, between documentary and fiction.
There are 20 sequences in all, each with a different woman. If you came back half an hour
later, you would see a different set of five women -- they're only passing through.
Private space is transient in public time.
--Julia Loktev, 2000 |