27 April - 28 May 1995

FLIGHT - FLIGHT

Alex Rizkalla

"Flight - Flight" took as its starting point a reflection by Wittgenstein on how words might be placed or generated, whether they are held in place through images: "Suppose I wanted to replace all the words of my language at once by new ones: how would I tell the place where one of the new words belongs?" Is it images that keep the places of the words? Rizkalla constructed two images relating to the notion of 'flight': one of a bird moving through the air, the other of women running naked through the street. This generated a meditation on memory, history and our understandings of the world (the scientific, the historical) and how those understandings are generated and sustained through memory. The photographic image can be read as analogous to the remembered image; from another time, another place, another context. By animating these images onto movement through passing them through a series of old slide projectors, the artist makes a parallel to the 'memory trigger' where one image occasions an ongoing narrative. One static image allows the flight to begin. The images of the bird in flight recalled the works of Muybridge, as did the images of the running women. On second sight it became clear that the women were not frozen in motion by the scientific gaze, but were running under the implacable stare of their Nazi guards, rendered politically and personally powerless by historical shifts that the rhetorics of the scientific were used to justify. Their flight was one of fear.