The Belgian town of Mechelen, with its 80,000 or so inhabitants, is not particularly well-known for its cutting-edge arts scene. This year, for the third time, it hosted the Contour Video Art Biennial. Its name couldn’t be more appropriately chosen: The Biennial takes the visitor on a route through the city, introducing locations that have lost their original function (a chapel, old hospital, meat market, supermarket) but still retain their former function’s aura to some extent, and locations that precisely because of their function (a café, subterranean parking lot, a bank), are particularly charged. In that sense the Biennial draws the contour of the city of Mechelen, blending its architecture and buildings with an impressive array of video art.
British guest curator Nav Haq entitled the exhibition »Decoder«, and contrary to many a failed curatorial attempt to blend a city’s texture with the stubbornness of the objet d’art, Haq has managed to simultaneously crack both their codes, whilst leaving enough enigma for the spectator to unravel. I have seldom seen an exhibition where the layered semantics of place and visual representation have been executed so well. For this alone, the show deserves to be credited. Particularly well-placed is the work of Taiwanese artist Tsui Kuang-Yu. Scattered strategically around the Grote Markt (the big market square), his »action videos« address the potential absurdity of everyday city life. The wonderful series »The Shortcut to the Systematic Life: City Spirits« (2005), exhibited at a café, show the artist as a sportive urban explorer who substitutes the park and its pigeons for a bowling alley and pins; parked scooters and other street obstacles for a hurdle race; trash-dumps for mountaineering, and parks and other random patches of grass for a golf court. Equally enticing is Kuang-Yu’s »The Shortcut to the Systematic Life: Superficial Life« (2002), where the artist – in rapid tempo – changes his outfits to fit each different city location, hence metamorphosing himself and the location he is in. This hyperbolic transformation – or adaptability, if you will – from one realm of functionality to the other, from one identity to the other, is almost a metaphor for the whole exhibition, wherein the expansion of a space’s role produces rich and diverse readings.
Such is the case for Belgian artist duo Aline Bouvy and John Gillis’ piece »Venusia« (2007). Placed in a former 19th-century chapel, their work is a lush collage of body parts, dismembered from their original glamorous advertisement models, floating animals, and kaleidoscopic patterns. The mere repetition of eyes, arms, heads, lips passing the screen is carnivalesque and celebrates the flesh in a generic way, yet it also suggests a commodified seriality and reproducibility, which puts a high-capitalist gloss over this artificial and easily expandable dream world. However, the latter never really crosses over into the sphere of direct consumption, since the religiosity of the chapel and its haunting organ soundtrack lend the piece a sacrosanct quality.
Cédric Noël’s counterfactual history piece, »Ein Reich« (2007), is a controlled, if not stoic, six-channel installation, placed in the Court of Justice. Speaking respectively in Russian, English, French, German, Hebrew and Dutch, each screen character relates a narrative that puts forward a view of history (and of the present) that could have been, had the Second World War taken a different turn. The narrative development is gradual, and requires patience on the part of the spectator to discern seeming fact from seeming fiction. It is almost as if, in this court of justice, history and memory are judged on their value as truth. In the catalogue interview with the curator, the artist says: »I’m only interested in fiction when it causes hesitation, when it puts certainties at risk and destabilizes the whole individual.« And this is exactly what »Ein Reich« does: It leaves the imprint of a question mark long after its viewing.
Present, past, memory, future and the articulation of self also come together in Sarah Vanagt’s spatially distributed five-channel installation »Ash Tree« (2007). We see a little girl playing amongst tombstones crowded around a tree, trying to spell the 18th-century British feminist Mary Wollstonecraft’s name. As the girl is struggling to read, the eerie graveyard surroundings immediately create intertextual layers, conjuring images of the book Frankenstein by Wollstonecraft’s daughter Mary Shelley. There seems to be an underpinning motif of cyclical history, female literary creation and discovery.
While Vanagt investigates a grammar by means of magnifying a snippet of a visual Bildungsroman, Gabriel Lester focuses on how the cinematic (especially its soundtrack) works as texture, syntax and as experiential conditioning. Filming in Brussels, Oostende, Mechelen and Antwerp, Lester shows an urban film noir architecture asleep, a shadow play of sound and light, which envelops us in a scenario that is yet to be written.
This being said, the exhibition has its flaws: The work of Omer Fast, Hassan Khan, Cao Guimarães, and Rosalind Nashashibi’s »Bachelor Machines Part2« simply did not communicate as works, nor with their respective settings. But as Swedish artist Saskia Holmkvist shows in her brilliant video »Interview with Saskia Holmkvist« (2005), we create our realities through mediated manipulation, and representation that is repeated and rehearsed until it feels real and authentic. In that respect, »Contour 2007: Decoder« need not strip bare to its source code and reiterate something it is not, for it is genuinely an excellent show.