Independent Extra
December 1, 2006 Friday
First Edition
MELIK OHANIAN: SEVEN MINUTES BEFORE;
Visual arts;
South London Gallery LONDON
by Sue Hubbard
A faint light glimmers at the end of a long tunnel. There is a sense
that we are passing through a transformative space as we emerge into
a high valley (so the voiceover tells us) in the Vercors mountains,
southern France. A stream babbles over rocks, an Asian girl plays a
haunting melody on a stringed koto, a lone wolf howls in a cage and a
camp fire burns within the walls of a derelict farm building. These
are some of the images that appear on the seven screens of the
French-Armenian artist Melik Ohanian’s video installation Seven
Minutes Before.
With a background in documentary film-making and cinema, Ohanian
makes implicit reference to cinema, contemporary art, music and
cosmology, attempting to bring together apparently disparate images
into a dramatic, cohesive whole. Located in a pristine Alpine
landscape, seemingly untouched for centuries, the narrative is framed
by two enigmatic events. The film starts with an account of the death
of 43 grazing horses found crushed to death at the bottom of a steep
cliff, while the final sequence presents a double accident: a white
van suddenly being hit by a motorbike that zooms in from a side
turning, and, further down the road, a camper van that spontaneously
explodes. There is no explanation for any of this but the two
incidents act as bookends to the images that arrive and dissolve on
the screens in front of us.
Seven Minutes Before does not attempt to construct a linear narrative
but rather provokes a mood that is at once both poetic and
philosophical and demands total involvement of the viewer to
construct a meaning. The elemental images that involve fire, water,
earth and rock, unfold as if in a dream. Perspectives are blurred, as
is our sense of time. What seems linear is continuously disrupted to
suggest alternative possibilities. The result is a palimpsest woven
from a multiplicity of events and elements. The central thesis
emerges as an investigation into time and space, memory and history.
The film also acknowledges our desire to understand the scope of
historical time and grasp something of the life of the entire
universe.
Seven Minutes Before is a film that debates complex questions about
what it means to exist in time and space, and asks which story
exactly is the one that should be told.
To 22 December (020-7252 4730)