W I T N E S S
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an installation
WITNESS is a personal docu-narrative video installation that explores the interplay of questions between the relationships we hold as private / public—as creator and spectator. It is a study in the shifts and inner workings of what it means to witness—its natural and imagined occurrences that we experience in a constellation of points of view in the presence of an in situ labyrinthine installation. WITNESS invites spectators to journey through artist Marlene Millar’s own experience as a witness to the unfolding of her mother’s dementia. In the dissembling, rearranging of memory—reorganizing an understanding of reality—WITNESS examines the emotional and spatial connections we observe between moments and movements of stability and instability. In the quiet rupture of space that lives and breathes in between, lies beauty and meaning amidst the loud peripheries of anxiety and fearfulness. Filmic tableaux navigate the viewer through a series of movement-based narratives that reflect on ageing, the end of life—a porous kind of tidal dream where time, space and nature are determined by the command of this disease. WITNESS reflects on the
shifting of one’s
relationships and the curious fold of new narratives that are revealed. To witness, is not one-directional.
Created over five years, WITNESS spans five spaces. Fully realized in the breadth of multi-spaces, the installation is adaptable as single components per venue or platform. Filmic works as floating articulations and constructs are poised in a delicate yet bracing hold. Works present the tactility of alternative screens and materials, weaving their way through their own etched darkened Milky Way corridors and configurations that all seemingly converge into a new lexicon of spatial language. WITNESS captures narratives intentionally less formally dance for screen than Millar’s previous works—what emerges with contemporary dancer, Carol Prieur, is an unexpected natural choreography that falls into more focused movement, the arc of falling – to repetitive domestic gestures, a changed rhythm further driving the story. Eloquent memoryscape projections using moonlight as their only source of ambient light brush up against us like a lyrical kinetic poem—collectively or singularly—never dissected—embodied as architected memory artifacts left to be encountered.
